A Different Switch
by Cimz
Summary: In 2008, cousins Starr Manning and Jessica Brennan go into labor on the same day. One baby lives; one baby dies. In desperation, a woman makes a switch. But not that baby, and not that woman. Primarily Brody/Jessica. Also Eli/Blair with hints of Starr/Schuyler.
1. The Birth of Chloe Brennan

Natalie's screams were the first thing Jessica noticed- before the hot slicing pain in her own stomach, before the total disorientation that came from lost time, and certainly before the fact that she was standing in front of makeshift prison and holding a bomb.

"Natalie?" Jessica asked confusedly. Everything was hazy and she didn't know why. "Natalie, what's going on?"

"Jess?" It was her sister's dubious tone of voice as much as the absurd situation she didn't remember getting herself into that made the world around her very, very clear to Jessica. Tess had taken over again.

She glanced down at her own stomach. It had been flat as a pancake when Nash had died; there had been no outward sign of the baby that was to be her only consolation. Now she looked ready to give birth. Worse, she _felt_ ready to give birth. "Oh, God," she whispered under her breath.

Tess was many things, and none of those things were "maternal" or "responsible." Thanks to Tess, Jessica had contracted hepatitis and needed a liver transplant. There was no way Tess had carefully taken her prenatal vitamins and attended appointments with Dr. Joplin. It would be a miracle if Tess hadn't watched her pregnancy develop from the bottom of a bottle of wine.

The next contraction almost knocked Jessica off her feet. "No, baby," she whispered. "No."

"Jessica," Natalie interrupted. "You need to let us take you the hospital."

"Yeah," agreed Jessica dizzily. "I need to go to the hospital."

"Then unlock us!" demanded Jared, sharp and terse. Jessica startled at the sound of his voice. She hadn't entirely registered his presence.

"How?" Jessica asked. Natalie and Jared's answers sounded like meaningless buzzing in her ears, but Jessica managed to shove the door open before she felt herself fall to the floor in a semiconscious haze. She tried to object to Natalie's barked order that Jared should pick her up- she didn't want Jared's hands on her, even now, after what he'd done to Nash- but her voice wouldn't work.

She was only dimly aware of the trip to the hospital and being lifted to a bed where nurses hurried to hook her up to monitors as her mother, newly returned from a trip abroad, flew into the room.

* * *

Dr. Leah Joplin gritted her teeth as she reviewed her young patient's vital statistics. Starr Manning was in labor; there was no doubt about that. Starr should have delivered her baby through a scheduled c-section before things had ever gotten this far; there was no doubt about that, either. But Leah had set aside her better medical judgment out of fear and self preservation, and now Starr and the baby were going to be the worse for it.

Starr was all of sixteen years old, and on a bad day she looked about eleven. Starr herself had been born prematurely, and between that and a serious babyhood illness she had never quite grown the way her pediatricians had hoped. She wasn't unhealthy or disabled or even outside the healthy size range for girls her age. But her hips were narrow and her pre-pregnancy weight had been less than 100 pounds. The baby inside Starr, though, was determined to take after her tall father and grandparents. The little girl was going to weigh in at least eight pounds, and likely closer to nine. It would be a tight fit.

It wouldn't be at all difficult to fake the child's death.

"Is something wrong?" Starr's mother hovered attentively over her young daughter; the would-be adoptive mother, too, stood at rigid attention.

"_Your psycho ex-husband is blackmailing me, that's what's wrong,"_ Leah fantasized about saying. "_He's going to ruin my son's life if I don't tell Starr her daughter is dead and hand the baby over to Todd. There's less room for something like that with a scheduled c-section so I didn't order one even though she needs it."_

"Everything's just fine," Leah lied aloud. "My concern is for another patient. I don't like to divide my attention between two patients when two babies seem determined to come into the world at the same time. Of course, I'll stay with Starr and have a colleague cover Jessica if necessary."

"Jessica's in labor, too?" Starr's wan face lit with a dreamy, romantic look. "That's so nice, two cousins born on the same day." Then, just as quickly, sadness took over. "Not that they'll grow up together like that, but it's still nice."

"Of course I'll tell her everything about her birth family just as soon as she's old enough to understand," Marcie McBain rushed to soothe Starr. "Where she came from, that's never going to be a secret. I'll tell her every day how lucky she was to have you for a birth mother. How brave and generous you were, how much you changed my life by giving me this gift."

Leah stepped away, murmuring about checking on Jessica.

Really, she didn't want to hear about how much this little girl had sacrificed for nothing.

* * *

Jessica's integration after her first split into multiple personalities several years before had been gradual and difficult. It had been achieved only with the guidance of her family and her doctors. Some memories hadn't returned to her conscious mind until months or even years had passed.

Her second integration was nothing like her first.

With each push, a memory slammed, fully-formed, into her consciousness.

Tess- Jessica- had sabotaged Natalie's car and hadn't lifted a finger to stop Viki from getting in instead.

Tess- Jessica- had tried to poison Natalie and Jared.

Tess- Jessica- had hired a contractor to build a secret room and imprisoned first Natalie and then Jared.

Tess- Jessica- had blackmailed Tina into keeping her secret by threatening her cousin Sarah.

Tess- Jessica- had blackmailed Todd into keeping her secret because she knew Todd's own secret. Hidden upstairs in Todd's new house was…

"Oh, God, Marty!" Jessica screamed as she gave a final push.

The baby slid into the world. "It's a girl," Dr. Joplin announced. "Another beautiful girl for you, Jessica."

"She's not crying," Jessica said anxiously. "Why isn't she crying?"

"She's breathing and she has a pulse," one of the assistants called out. "Some babies don't cry."

"Straight to the NICU, anyway," Dr. Joplin ordered. "Everything that can be done will be done."

Jessica sank back against her pillow. Her worst fears had come true. Her mental weakness had killed her own baby. "Why wasn't she crying?" she asked the universe. Her own breath was shallow and swift.

"You heard the doctor. Babies don't always cry right away," Viki soothed. "Making yourself sick will do nothing to help her, especially if she's back here in five minutes ready to be fed."

Jessica nodded and tried desperately to control her own thoughts.

"You called out Marty's name," Viki said kindly. "I know you miss her. Were you thinking of calling the baby Margaret?"

Jessica groaned as humiliation reasserted itself. "No. No, I- Tess- I- I locked Natalie in a room in the basement for months."

"That was Tess. That was not you," said Viki hastily. "Of course you will have to have treatment to reintegrate properly-"

"That's not what I mean! Uncle Todd knew. Uncle Todd knew all about it. It wasn't just Tina- I heard you yelling at Tina. But Todd kept quiet because Tess was blackmailing him."

Viki looked skyward. "Do I even want to know?"

"Marty's alive, Mom. Todd is keeping her prisoner in that house he bought when Blair threw him out. Except she doesn't know that he's keeping her prisoner, because she has amnesia and she thinks she's in love with him. He's going to rape her all over again if he hasn't already. Mom, we have to get her out of there!"

* * *

Everything that could go wrong with Starr's delivery did. When Starr, sobbing and exhausted, finally delivered the little girl, there had been a prolonged period of oxygen deprivation that frightened Leah beyond words.

For the second time that day, she and her team rushed from the room with a baby girl who didn't cry.

The doctors in the NICU were miracle workers. By the time Leah arrived with Baby Manning, Baby Brennan was wriggling and crying just as a newborn should.

Baby Manning never cried.

Todd Manning would get one part of his wish; Starr would be told that her daughter was dead. Unfortunately for Todd, it would be the truth.

Out of the corner of her tear-filled eyes- there was nothing on this earth worse than a stillborn baby, and the experience never got easier- Leah saw a tall, lanky man dressed in standard green scrubs enter the room. A chill ran down her spine. She knew that he was no doctor.

"Where's my granddaughter?" Todd demanded. "That her?" He pointed at Jessica Brennan's daughter. "Looks like a Lord. I can see Viki in her."

"No." Leah's gaze drifted uncomfortably to the fair-haired little girl who had never opened her eyes. Todd followed her glance.

"You better not be saying that kid is mine. I came here to tell you that I changed my mind. I came here to tell you to let Starr have her kid. But if Starr doesn't get her kid, I promise you that that druggie son of yours-"

Leah had no choice. Schuyler was teaching high school biology and doing better than he'd done in a long time. Leah could not trade his life for anything in the world; he was her only child and she loved him to distraction. Besides, she rationalized meanly, Jessica Brennan hadn't even bothered with most of her prenatal appointments. Who was to say whether she would take proper care of an infant? Starr, though… Starr had done everything right, and Marcie McBain was ready to be a mother.

"Starr's daughter is fine," Leah said smoothly. It was what should have been. "I'll bring her in to meet her mother if that's what you want."

"It's what I want," ordered Todd.

* * *

Jessica's father had taken her mother's place at her bedside while Viki made appropriate calls regarding her black sheep rapist of a brother.

"The police are on their way over there by now," Clint promised. "Try not to worry too much about Natalie. Focus on your new baby."

"I've thought of her name," Jessica told him shyly. It had come to her with no explanation. "Chloe."

Clint smiled his approval. "Chloe Brennan. It passes the Supreme Court test. You know, when you name a baby you have to imagine her as a Supreme Court justice."

"Bree and Chloe Brennan," Jessica tried. She would never see Nash again, but at least she had his little girls.

* * *

Viki was just returning to Jessica's room when a familiar figure stood in her way. "Hey, Sis," said Todd. "You and me, becoming grandparents on the same day. How about that?"

Viki slapped him.

Then she called hospital security and told them that this man was wanted by the Llanview Police Department.

She had excused Todd's behavior more times than she could count. But what he had done this time- to Marty, to Natalie, to Jessica- was beyond forgiveness.

* * *

Over and over, Starr looked toward the door.

"I'm sure they'll be back with the baby soon," Blair told her. "You were so sick when you were born that it seemed like forever, but you came back to me."

"That's not what I was thinking of," Starr admitted. She sighed heavily. "I know you aren't going to like this, but I called Dad and told him I was in labor."

"You did _what_?"

"I know," said Starr. "I just wanted to hear his voice. I thought he'd come down. I'm surprised he hasn't."

"So am I," said Blair. "Maybe I'd better go look around and see if he's out there."

When Blair opened the door, it was to Dr. Leah Joplin, carrying a tiny, perfect baby.

Thirty seconds later, her ex-husband was led past the door in handcuffs.

_To be continued._

**Note**: _This is a fic that I've had an idea for since forever. Still, I'm not sure that I want to write it… not only is OLTL apparently dead again, but even if it has another Lazarus moment, almost all of the characters featured here will be long gone. We'll see. _


	2. The Birth of Hope Manning

Starr shook her head when Dr. Joplin tried to place the baby in her arms. "Marcie is her mother," she said firmly. "Marcie should hold her first."

Starr kept her arms flat by her sides. She would accept no arguments. Deep down inside, she had had doubts about her decision to allow Marcie to adopt her daughter. Cole hated the idea. Langston hated the idea. Todd hated the idea. Dorian hated the idea. Addie hated the idea. Basically, every important person in Starr's life other than Blair hated the idea, and Blair wasn't saying what she thought. That had to mean something.

But Starr had come too far to go back. When she looked at the baby, she didn't feel like the little girl's mother. The child belonged to someone else. The child belonged to Marcie.

"Have you thought of a name?" Starr asked, cool as if she were in a coffee shop and catching up with her English teacher who happened to be on maternity leave.

"I have." Marcie swallowed hard. "One name keeps coming back to me. I'd like to call her Hope. That's what you've given me, Starr. Hope. I was at the lowest place in my life when you walked into my apartment and told me you were pregnant. I've always wanted to be a mother more than anything. It couldn't happen biologically and after what happened with Tommy- Sam- I thought it couldn't happen through adoption. You have given me the gift of knowing that my life can move forward. You've given me Hope."

"Hope," Starr repeated. "It's perfect. I know you'll give her the life I want for her. The life every child should have, knowing her mother wanted her more than anything, that she wasn't just some mistake two freaked out teenagers made."

"She's not a mistake," Marcie said, and a tear rolled down her cheek. "She was meant to be here. My Hope. You know," she added parenthetically, "I always thought that if I had a daughter I'd name her Jennifer. But I know that's not who this little girl is. Isn't it funny how that works?"

"Yeah," agreed Starr, even though she had no idea. She'd wanted to name Jack "Ichabod" after her favorite doll, and she still thought that that might have been a better name than Jack. She wondered where her mother was. Blair would get her out of this weird, awkward conversation. Blair was good at that.

"I wonder where your mother went?" Marcie asked, echoing Starr's thoughts. "There was a commotion out there. I hope nothing's wrong."

* * *

"I hope nothing's wrong," Jessica said to Clint. It was a strange thing to say when her arms had been tied down to keep her from leaving her bed. Clint had protested, but Jessica had been fine with it. She had nearly killed Natalie and Jared short hours before; almost as bad, she had kept Todd's secret about Marty and threatened poor Sarah's life. Until she was absolutely sure that she wouldn't hurt anyone else, Jessica needed to protect the world from herself.

It would have been nice to be able to brush her own hair out of her eyes rather than ask her father to do it, but that was a small price in comparison to her twin sister's life.

"Do you think Natalie- What do you think Natalie is doing?"

"Don't you worry about Natalie," Clint rushed to assure. "She's strong and she's tough and she's a fighter. She's come through worse than what you put her through and she's come through it ready to love and forgive. The fact that she even gives Roxanne Balsom the time of day, much less anything else…" Clint's gaze drifted off into the distance, and Jessica could see his pain at not having known the little girl Natalie had been. "She'll forgive you. She knows you weren't yourself. She knows how losing Nash the way you did destroyed you."

Jessica shifted uncomfortably against her restraints. She needed to feel Nash's daughter beside her again. She'd find a way to go on for Chloe- for Chloe and Bree.

But when Viki and Dr. Joplin entered the room together, Jessica knew what they were going to tell her. She had been through this once before with her first daughter, Megan Victoria.

She started to cry before Dr. Joplin opened her mouth.

Tess hadn't taken care of herself or Chloe. Tess hadn't taken vitamins or eaten well or gotten enough rest. Tess had skipped one checkup after another. Tess had had other priorities.

_Jessica_ had had other priorities.

Megan's death hadn't been her fault, but this time Jessica had killed her own baby. She had killed Nash's baby. She had ended Nash's legacy. She had starved the last living embodiment of her and Nash's love to death before she'd ever had a chance to see the world.

"She's with Nash now," Viki tried. "Nash is keeping Chloe warm and safe. Chloe will never feel any pain."

"Then she'll never feel love," said Jessica. "She'll never know what one is without the other."

"It's like that for adults, Jessie, but for babies…"

Jessica closed her eyes and tuned her mother out. She had no way to dry the tears streaming down her face while her arms were in restraints, but she didn't care. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered. She had failed Chloe and she had failed Bree. She might as well let Natalie raise Bree now. Natalie was the strong one, after all, and Jessica knew from her suddenly recovered memories that Tess had terrified poor Bree.

Clint and Viki wiped Jessica's tears for her.

Jessica was always the child and never the parent.

* * *

It seemed to Starr that an eternity passed before Blair came in. Wrung out and overwhelmed as she was, Starr still noticed that Blair looked extremely worried. There was bad news to be told and Starr knew it.

Blair confirmed it when she asked Marcie to escort Hope back to the nursery.

Starr sat up blearily. "What's going on, Mom?"

"There's no easy way to say this," Blair began. "I wouldn't even tell you right now if I weren't concerned that it might affect what you want to do about the baby."

"I don't have anything to do with Hope. She's Marcie's daughter," Starr repeated firmly. It was hard for Blair to understand, she knew. Blair had never wavered in her support of Starr no matter how outrageous Starr's behavior had gotten. Blair had loved Jack long before she found out that he was her biological child. Blair was even starting to love Sam, who had been born to a woman who had tried to destroy their whole family. Blair didn't know what it was to look at an hour-old baby and feel like you hadn't given birth to her, even as your body swam with tiredness and painkillers.

"You can't legally make that decision for three days and you know it."

"I'll forward-date the documents right now. Call Eli."

Blair half-smiled. "Eli is not going to do that. I hired Eli to protect you in this whole mess."

"I know, but I don't need protecting. I don't need my own lawyer. Marcie's lawyer could have handled everything. But if you want to keep Eli around a little longer, I can pretend I need more time to think it over." She wiggled her eyebrows suggestively. "I don't think he needs more time, though. He really likes you. I can tell."

"Eli is your attorney for the purposes of this adoption. He is not anything else."

"Would you like him to be?"

"No." Blair tapped Starr on the nose like Starr was a little kid instead of a woman who had given birth.

"Why not? He's handsome. Successful. Smart."

"I am not in the market for any man, no matter how handsome, successful, and smart he is."

"Why not?" Starr repeated. "I spent my whole life wanting you and Dad together. It took… _this_," and she gestured at her deflated, ravaged abdomen, "to realize that I never should have done the things I did. The spying and the snakes and the handcuffs and the hunger strikes and the running away and-"

"This could take all day," Blair interrupted. "It's normal for a child to want her parents together. You were, let's say, enthusiastic and creative, but it was always my choice to be with your father. Not yours."

"You wouldn't have left him if it hadn't been for me," said Starr. "You never would have left him if he hadn't thrown me down those stairs."

"We'll never know."

"I don't want you to be alone because of me. So, Eli-"

"We are not going to discuss Eli. We need to talk about your father."

"Where is he? Do you know?"

Blair nodded. "He's in jail, Starr."

It was the story of Starr's life. "Again?"

"I'm afraid so."

"He didn't try to kidnap Jack and Sam, did he? Oh, God, he didn't do something to Cole, or to Markko or-"

"Cole is probably getting some great news right now. You see, his mother is alive."

"That's great," said Starr in the split second before she put the pieces together. "Dad did something to Marty, didn't he?"

"She had amnesia and she didn't know who he was. So he held her captive and presented himself as her savior, her benefactor, a man she could fall in love with-"

"That's disgusting!" Starr's shriek bounced off the walls. "He let Cole think she was dead. He let everyone think she was dead!"

Starr ranted for several minutes. It wasn't until she ran out of things to say that Blair spoke again. "You need to think about whether this changes your mind about Hope."

"Why would it change my mind?" Starr asked. "I'm not ready to raise a baby. Marcie wants a baby more than anything and this is the only way she'll ever have one."

"You would have all the help you need to raise a baby and Marcie's happiness is not your responsibility." Blair raised her hand to stave off Starr's automatic protest. "All I'm saying is that if any part of you made this decision because you wanted to punish your father by making him watch the woman who kidnapped his son raise his granddaughter, things have changed. He's not going to be around to see it. If any part of you was afraid of the influence your father would have over your daughter, things have changed. He's not going to be around to insinuate himself into her life. If any part of you was afraid that your father would continue to be a threat to Cole if you tried to make a family with him, that's not going to happen, either."

Starr nodded like she was thinking about it, but she wasn't, not really. She had made her decision long ago. The way she felt- didn't feel- when she looked at Hope only confirmed that she'd been right.

* * *

Marcie could have stared at Hope through the nursery windows for hours. In less than three days, Starr would sign the adoption papers and Marcie would officially have a daughter. The only thing missing from her life was Michael by her side.

And just like that, he appeared. "Where is she?" he asked without preamble.

Marcie pointed. "That one. That's Hope."

"I'm surprised you didn't call her Jen." Michael still knew Marcie better than anyone.

"So am I," she told him.

"I don't see Cole in her at all," Michael mused. "Starr, maybe. Definitely a Lord."

"Michael, you are not going to start with that again, are you? That she's Todd Manning's granddaughter so it can't possibly work out?"

Michael shook his head. "I just got a call from John. Todd's not going to be an issue for you or Starr or Cole or… Marty."

"Marty?" Marcie's jaw dropped. "But Marty…"

"Was being held prisoner by the currently incarcerated Mr. Todd Manning. John has another chance with her now. Another chance he never thought he'd get." Michael looked meaningfully at Marcie.

"Are you saying… are you saying that you want to be this baby's father after all?"

"I'm saying I'm ready to try again as your husband. Whether or not Hope is part of the equation."

In one day, Marcie had gone from having nothing to having everything.

* * *

It wasn't long before Dr. Levin arrived from St. Ann's to tell Jessica that she would be transported there by ambulance as soon as she was physically ready to be released from the hospital.

Jessica didn't answer him.

She didn't care.

_**TBC.**_


	3. The Fall of Brody Lovett

Navy SEALS never surrendered and they never let themselves get taken alive. That wasn't mindless boasting; it was just a fact. Such a thing had never been documented, not in the thirty-plus years since the first official SEAL teams had started carrying out reconnaissance missions in Cuba. Every time Brody had gone out with his team in Iraq or Afghanistan he had been well aware that his options were getting himself back to the base or dying. He had been fine with that. They had all been fine with that.

And yet, not a year after he left Iraq for the final time, he found himself on a quiet, safe mountain in a quiet, safe corner of Pennsylvania letting himself get taken alive.

_"__Focus on my voice! Drop the weapon!"_ Instinctively, Brody focused. It was that focus that sent him spinning in a confused circle. He could feel the cool November air of Llantano mountain around him, but when he looked down he saw the dead Iraqi boy.

"I had to do it. I had to shoot him," he heard his own voice say before strong hands seized his numb body and pushed his face into the dry leaves that covered the ground.

No one paid Brody much mind for the next several days. He sat in the jail cell where they put him and repeated the words that had been his mantra ever since he'd left Iraq.

"I did what I had to do. I followed the code."

It didn't make the memory of the dead boy any less haunting.

"I had to do it," he said again, trying to feel the imprint of Wes' voice on the words. Brody didn't much like being alone. He never had. That was what had made him tell an abandoned pregnant teenager that he would marry her and claim her unborn son as his own. That was what had made the SEALS, with their emphasis on teamwork and togetherness, a perfect fit for him. That was what had made him throw himself into an unending string of bar fights and one night stands until Gigi and Shane had unexpectedly reentered his life. That was what had made him desperate to hold onto Shane when Gigi had decided to tell the truth about the boy's parentage ten years after the fact.

Brody by himself wasn't enough.

He spent nights dodging the Iraqi boy, who flitted in and out of his cell pointing a gun at Brody.

He wished the boy would just pull the trigger.

Each morning, he waited for official word of his status. He knew now that he had shot a man that the local police commissioner loved like a son, so his status couldn't possibly be anything good. He doubted that anyone would care that at the time he'd pulled the trigger, he'd been blinded by the light of an exploding caravan and desperate to protect Wes and Abbott and Mike from meeting the same fate as the guys in the truck. No one should care about it, really. It was ridiculous. He wasn't in Iraq, and he had almost killed Shane's father before Shane even got to know him.

When news finally came, Commissioner Buchanan came to see Brody in person. Brody steeled himself to look the man in the eye, and was taken aback when he saw nothing but kindness there. He'd stared down dozens, maybe hundreds, of men who wanted to kill him just for being an American. Here was a powerful man who had every reason to hate Brody but was watching him like a kindly uncle. Or so Brody imagined. He'd never actually had uncles.

"How are you today, Lieutenant Lovett?"

The use of Brody's rank was even weirder than the soft, disarming smile. "Doesn't matter," said Brody. "How's Rex?"

"Stable," said Bo neutrally. "He'll recover."

Relief staggered through Brody. "I'm glad. I'm so sorry that-"

"I know. I didn't come down here to talk about Balsom. I came here to talk about you."

Brody didn't know what to say to that, and he was silent as the Commissioner appropriated a folding chair and seated himself inches from Brody's cell. He gestured that Brody should sit, too. "I don't think you were in a position to pick up a lot the other night, so I'm just going to tell you again that I served in the United States Army. Did a few tours in Vietnam. That's how I happen to know post-traumatic stress disorder when I see it. Did you even know you were shooting at Balsom?"

Brody shook his head, not trusting himself to speak around the lump in his throat.

"What did you think you were shooting at?"

"The insurgents were really bad that month," Brody said hollowly. "The caravan blew up right in front of us, and there was this kid- he had a gun-"

The Commissioner nodded like this wasn't a surprise to him. "I spoke to your buddy Wes Granger the other day. He told me you had a really hard time toward the end."

Brody nodded again. Wes was always protecting him. It was the SEAL way.

"I think- and Gigi thinks- and Balsom thinks too- that you need a doctor a lot more than you need a jail cell. I certainly don't want my prison space wasted on a man who served his country and never had any intention of hurting anyone. So if you are amenable, the district attorney is prepared to accept a deal the sends you to St. Ann's instead of to Statesville."

"St. Ann's is a mental institution?" Brody guessed. Part of him would have preferred prison. The other part of him knew that he would never be safe around Shane again if he didn't take the deal.

"It's a hospital where people who are hurt go to get better."

"Thank you," whispered Brody.

* * *

Jessica was intimately familiar with St. Ann's and the services it provided. Check-in was easy. Only the goodbyes were hard.

"If you think this is too soon, you can stay in the hospital for a few more days," Viki offered. "It's not too late to turn around."

"No. I'm ready," Jessica said. She didn't feel ready. She didn't feel ready to be anywhere without Nash and Chloe, though, so it didn't matter.

"We're with you every step of the way," promised Clint.

"And me too. If you'll let me," added Natalie, who gave every impression of having come to wish Jessica well rather than make sure she was under lock and key. Kevin and Joey sent flowers.

Bree, though, seemed indifferent to the whole thing. Tess' attitude toward Bree had been one of benign neglect, Jessica's newly recovered memories told her. It could have been much worse, but it still pained Jessica to see Bree unconcerned as to whether Jessica held her or not. Jessica could have been any stranger off the street.

Two of her daughters were dead; the third barely knew her.

Jessica was not exactly lighting the world on fire when it came to parenting.

"I don't know how I'm gonna leave you," Jessica told Bree. Bree would have forgotten Jessica completely by the time St. Ann's released her. Jessica would lose more and more ground with her daughter. The task before her when the doctors let her go home would be almost impossible.

Bree didn't care.

* * *

Blair wasn't entirely sure that Starr had thought her decision through, but nothing she said convinced Starr to reconsider. Starr didn't want to hold Hope; Starr didn't want to discuss her reasons for giving Hope to Marcie; Starr didn't even want to look at Hope for more than a few seconds.

Half a dozen times, Blair almost explicitly asked Starr to let her raise Hope. Half a dozen times, Blair bit her tongue just in time, reminding herself that this was Starr's decision.

Blair hated to agree with Todd about anything, but in this case, it was unavoidable: the idea of Marcie McBain raising her first grandchild made her sick. Blair had spent her own childhood in foster care and orphanages; the whole experience had been miserable. It wasn't that she thought Marcie would treat Hope the way the State of Florida had treated Blair, but something deep inside of her would always rebel against the idea of giving away her own flesh and blood when there was another option.

The part of Blair that always wanted to seek revenge for an injustice certainly didn't appreciate the irony of Starr rewarding Marcie's kidnapping of Sam by handing over Sam's little niece. Marcie had schemed and manipulated and broken the law, and everyone had coddled her. When Blair had schemed and manipulated and broken the law, she'd been pushed to the fringes of society. That was how she had ended up forging a life with Todd Manning, the infamous convicted gang rapist, in the first place. Blair had grown up and learned to toe the line for her children's sake; Todd was right back where he started, in jail for raping Marty.

All of that ran through her mind when she opened the front door of La Boulaie to Elijah Clarke.

"Starr!" she shouted up the stairs. "Eli's here."

"_I'll be there in a minute," _Starr called back.

"Sorry," Blair told Eli. "She'll be right down."

"No rush," said Eli, and he flicked his eyes up and down Blair's body so subtly that she wasn't entirely sure that she'd seen him do it. Starr hadn't been wrong about the signals Eli was sending. It was just too bad that Starr was devoting her brainpower to that instead of to admitting why she wanted to hand her daughter over to a sanctimonious bitch.

"You have the papers?"

Eli nodded. "All she has to do is sign them and I'll file them officially today. She hasn't changed her mind, has she?"

Blair couldn't quite swallow her sigh. "No. I thought she might when she found out that her father was going to be out of the picture completely, but she's sticking to her decision."

"And you haven't told her that you disagree."

Blair was taken aback. "Who says I disagree?"

"You haven't said. But I can tell." Eli smiled sadly. "I really admire how much you've kept your own opinion out of it. You've really let it be your daughter's decision."

"It was her body. Her baby."

"And she's your baby."

"Always," Blair agreed. The conversation was getting far too personal for her. "_Starr_!" she tried again.

"_I'm on my way,_" called Starr, and Blair caught the undertone that suggested that Starr was quite deliberately taking her time.

"Do you want me to leave the papers and bring them by my office when she's signed them?" Eli asked.

Blair laughed. "Wouldn't that just deflate Starr's little balloon."

"I don't follow."

_What the hell_, Blair thought. Her dealings with Eli were coming to an end. "Starr is of the opinion that you and I should continue to spend time together when there is no longer a professional reason to do so."

This time, Eli didn't bother to mask the fact that he was looking at Blair's legs, and her hips, and her waist, and her breasts. "No wonder you put so much faith in Starr's ability to make her own decisions. She's a very smart girl." He took a step closer to Blair, his breath hot on her cheek.

"I'm not in the market for that. Not with anyone. I spent most of my life in a relationship with Starr's father even when we weren't together, and that was a disaster."

"Doesn't have to be a relationship," Eli said, low and guttural. "If all you want to do is take your mind off your daughter putting your granddaughter up for adoption and your ex-husband going to jail for rape… I've got nothing against providing that distraction."

"I don't know you well enough to get distracted with you in that way." Blair's heart fluttered. Eli was handsome, and just enough younger to make this whole thing very flattering. "Not without protection," she added.

Eli's smile could have melted her clothes right there. As if by magic, he made a condom appear in his hand; it disappeared into his suit pocket when Starr's careful footsteps finally echoed on the stairs.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," said Starr. "Everything's still slower than I expect it to be. It's hard to imagine how sore everything can get until it happens, you know?" She winced theatrically. Blair hadn't seen such a performance since Starr had fainted into Todd's arms, insisting that she'd fought off a kidnapper and shouldn't Jack's christening be canceled and the day made all about Starr?

"The papers are the same as they were before, but you can read them again if you'd like," Eli told her.

Starr beamed winningly at Eli. "It's okay. I trust you. Where do I sign?"

"On the X. You need to initial the bottom of the first two pages as well."

Starr did as she was told with lightening speed. "And they'll be filed today? Marcie will officially be Hope's mother?"

"You will have officially renounced your rights. It will take a few more months for Marcie, but there won't be anything standing in her way."

"Thank you so much, Eli." She shook Eli's hand solemnly.

"My pleasure."

"Is there anything else you need from me?"

"You have somewhere to go?" Blair injected.

"Now that I'm starting to get my body back, I wanted to go to the mall and get some new clothes for winter, you know? Isn't that okay?"

"Fine," Blair told her. "Have fun."

* * *

Starr laughed all the way to the police station. She might well go to the mall later in the day- she _did_ need to augment her wardrobe, since neither her maternity clothes nor her regular clothes fit her properly at the moment- but first she had something much more fun in mind.

Starr had been visiting her parents in jail (usually her father, but occasionally her mother) for as long as she remembered. The police officers reacted almost as if they had been waiting for her and escorted her to the holding cells without incident.

She smirked to see her father behind bars where he belonged.

"Hi, Shorty," he said when he saw her.

"Don't call me that. You haven't called me that for years."

"You've grown up. I've had a hard time seeing that sometimes, but…" he trailed off.

"Really." Starr clapped her hands to her face in mock surprise. "I hadn't notice between you almost killing my boyfriend, and then almost killing my baby and me, and then almost killing my boyfriend again."

"Starr."

"Is it better or worse that you've gone back to torturing Marty instead of torturing me?"

"I love you, Starr. I never meant to hurt you or my granddaughter."

Starr beamed. "She's not your granddaughter any more. I signed the papers today. Marcie and Michael are so thrilled to have a new baby to love as much as they loved Tommy."

His face darkened threateningly, but it didn't scare her. She was far beyond being scared of this man. "I could have stopped that from happening. I didn't do it because I love you."

"What do you mean, you could have stopped it? What you should stop doing is deluding yourself."

"You'll find out anyway. I told Marty that my daughter was having a baby she wasn't ready to raise. I told Marty that she and I would take the baby and keep her until you were ready. Months, years, forever."

"And I was going to agree with this?"

"You were going to think that your baby was dead. But I didn't do it. I didn't go through with it, because I loved you so much. I would never let you go through what Jessica is going through, losing her baby. How's Jessica doing?"

"Like I'd tell you," said Starr. In truth, she didn't even know. She'd been so caught up in her own world that she'd forgotten to ask. "But I'll tell you how I'm doing. I'm mad at God for letting that innocent little baby die and letting someone like you live."

_**TBC**_


	4. The Summoning of Schuyler Joplin

**Part 4: The Summoning of Schuyler Joplin**

Thanksgiving in a mental institution wasn't worse than combat. It wasn't worse than the extreme heat and cold, the MREs, the weight on his back, the fear in his gut, the hours spent moving ten feet, the days spent lying still in a cave, the choices between killing and being killed, the insurgents and explosions and dead friends.

Thanksgiving in a mental institution was worse than pretty much everything else.

Brody desperately sought some sign of familiarity amidst the straight jackets and mumbled chatter about non-existent puppies and glittery art projects. His eye lit upon a small nerf football. He had not expected to find something so normal in such a controlled place.

_Football on Thanksgiving. _He tossed the ball in the air and took pleasure in the slapping sound it made in his hands.

That was when a woman the nuns had called Barb snatched the ball from him and cradled it to her chest. Brody knew that he should have compassion for the woman; she was a poster child for places like this. But he couldn't have a family or Gigi or Shane or his SEAL teammates or a career or his freedom or his own sanity.

He at least wanted the damn football.

It wasn't as if Barb was using it. She just wanted to take it away because Brody had been enjoying it. Brody had met people with that attitude in every corner of the world. In the SEALs, he had been able to make people like that give up what didn't rightfully belong to them. In St. Ann's, that sort of force would no doubt result in a trip to a padded room, if not a trip to Statesville.

"Wanna play catch?" he suggested angrily. There. He was offering to include the nasty little thief in his game. What could be more mentally healthy than that?

"I don't wanna play anything," Barb whimpered.

"Fine. Just give me the ball."

"No."

"You're not even using it," he said, perhaps with too much logic for a shivering woman who was trying to contort herself into a fetal position.

"Yes, I am. I'm keeping it away from you. You could knock someone's eye out with this thing." She kept her own eyes carefully averted from his.

"_It's made of foam! It's not dangerous!" _Brody raised his voice more than he'd meant to. Statesville was starting to look like a better idea by the minute. Violence, Brody could deal with.

"Actually," said a smooth female voice from behind him, "it _is_ dangerous." Brody turned in disbelief to see the owner of the voice blowing her nose loudly. She followed it up with a cough which Brody immediately registered as fake. "Do you know how many pairs of hands have touched that thing? Dozens. Maybe hundreds. The germs on that could take out a hazmat unit."

Barb flung the ball to the floor and, hunched over, scrambled from her chair. "Get this thing away from me."

"You're in a mental institution," Brody's savior informed him, as if he could have forgotten. All signs of illness had vanished; her clear blue eyes locked on Brody's. "Learn how to speak the language and you'll be fine."

With that, she settled into her own chair with a magazine.

Brody tossed the ball from hand to hand, but a nerf football was no longer the most interesting thing in the room.

Brody had never had a problem approaching women. (It was no secret that "_I'm a Navy SEAL" _was all the pickup line a man would ever need. The SEAL groupies, called Frog Hogs, didn't even require that much.) He hesitated a moment before approaching this one, however. It wasn't that he found her beauty intimidating so much as that he found her beauty out of place. Mental patients were supposed to look like Barb, with her messy hair and greasy skin and perpetual cringing. They were not supposed to look like models who had just stepped off a runway, excepting the hospital-issued gray sweats, of course.

"Hi," he said. "I'm Brody."

She glanced up briefly, then returned to her reading. "Jessica."

"How's the magazine?" he tried.

She flipped it over so that he could see the cover. It looked to be a bit young for Shane. "_Kid Time_? It's three years old and it's a grade four reading level."

"Wanna play HORSE? That's at least a fifth grade game."

Jessica shook her head. She had stepped in to dissolve the disagreement between Brody and Barb, but that was her human interaction for the day. She'd done her good deed and made her progress. Playing games and making friends was nowhere on her agenda, not when her baby was lying cold and dead in a tiny coffin. "I just want to eat my dinner and go to bed. Cross this day off my calendar."

"Understood," Brody said. "Thanks for stepping in just now. I appreciate the assist."

"Barb? She's harmless," Jessica observed casually. There were mental patients who were frightening and dangerous, but Barb was not among them.

Brody wasn't willing to leave it at that. "So, I'm sorry. Didn't you just get here?"

"I've been here before," Jessica said, more to make it real to herself than because it happened to be any of Brody's business.

"Oh. Right." She could see his surprise.

"Right. I'm as loony as they come." Jessica said it like it was a joke. It wasn't.

"I'm a first timer," Brody pressed, clearly not willing to return to his football and leave her alone. "I don't know what to expect. You don't seem… crazy."

"Because I'm rational? Yeah, at the moment."

"Yeah, and I mean, your hair is brushed and you're looking me in the eye. Some of these people-"

Brody's ramblings were getting more and more annoying. Jessica had always been judged by her appearance: the pretty, rich princess. As a teenager, she'd practically had to beg Cristian to give her a chance to prove that she had substance. A few years later, Natalie had arrived and cast herself as the strong, fiery one- complete with red hair- and Jessica as the weak one- complete with blonde hair. "Just because they don't care about what they look like doesn't mean they're not human," she told Brody.

He at least had enough grace to pretend that that wasn't what he'd meant. That didn't do much for the torrent of frustration, fear, and grief swirling inside Jessica.

"Look, why don't you check with me in a few days and see if my hair's okay," she snapped.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to offend you." The minute Brody started to walk away, Jessica was hit with a rush of remorse. She'd been trying to get rid of him for the whole conversation; now he was just one more person she'd hurt.

"Wait," she called after him. "Brody. I've had a rough go of it. I'm a little touchy."

He turned back immediately, his desperation to make some kind of human connection palpable. Jessica remembered how scared she'd been the first time she'd come to St. Ann's. She couldn't bring Chloe back to life, but she could honor the life Chloe hadn't gotten to live every day by being just a little kinder. "You're a mental patient," said Brody. "Same as me. You're entitled."

"It's safe here," she assured him. "You don't have to be afraid of the other patients."

"I'm more afraid of myself," he said with a self-awareness she hadn't given him credit for.

"Well, most of us are. So what are you in for?"

"You have have read about it," said Brody. "The doctors are calling it PTSD, but the simple truth is, I knocked a girl out, I kidnapped a kid, and I shot a guy."

Jessica hadn't had time to read about anything, but she knew the story. The guy Brody had shot was Rex Balsom, and Tess had gleefully shown Natalie just enough of the news to convince her that Rex was dead.

The world was a small place.

"Is that it?" she teased Brody.

"Your story's so much worse?" He seemed doubtful.

"You have no idea."

"So lay it on me. What's your story?" He still seemed doubtful.

"Where to begin. I have a disorder called DID, which is basically multiple personalities. One of my alters, which is what the other personalities are called, tried to kill my sister and her boyfriend… three times."

"Three times."

"First she cut the brake lines in her car, and then she tried to poison them, and then, when that didn't work, she built a hidden room in the basement of our house and locked them up there for months and tortured them, telling them what she would do to them, and then when she got tired of that, she built a bomb to blow them to bits. Right. I win."

"You win, all right." Brody started to back away.

"I didn't mean to scare you," said Jessica, even though she knew that there couldn't possibly be any other reaction to her story.

"I'm just not used to all of this."

"Of course you're not. You have your stuff too. I didn't mean to minimize it. I just want you to understand that the way people look in here doesn't mean a thing. Barb? She wouldn't hurt a fly. She's afraid of everything. That's why she can't exist on the outside. Do yourself a favor and don't assume anything about anybody, and you'll be much better off."

Brody seemed to accept that. "Any other advice before the therapy starts tomorrow?"

"You don't like therapy?" It was clear from his dubious tone.

"I've never done it," he said judiciously. "I don't like talking about myself."

"Well, you should kinda get over that. The sooner you lift up that rock and dig out all the muck that's underneath, the sooner you can get better and go home to your family. That's the whole point, right?"

She saw in his eyes the flash of pain that she felt when she thought of Chloe. There was someone he wouldn't be going home to, too. But Jessica was tired of pushing herself. If she started to talk about Chloe and Nash, she would dissolve into a sobbing mess. That wouldn't do her any good and it certainly wouldn't do Brody any good.

The fact that talking with her was doing Brody some good was a warm, pleasant surprise.

It had been a long time since Jessica had been any good to anyone. Bree barely knew her; Natalie and Jared surely wished they didn't know her. Chloe was dead; Nash, too, might have been alive had he never followed Tess to Llanview.

As paper thin as she was, she could be strong for someone else, even if that strength was just in the form of talking about navigating the mental health system.

It was a start.

She sat across from Brody at Thanksgiving dinner and found herself thankful that he was there.

* * *

Leah had never been much for celebrating Thanksgiving. Growing up, her father had always preferred to be at the prison; inmates often chose holidays, with their skeleton staffing, to stage riots or even jailbreaks. It was Warden Perkins' job to keep that from happening. Leah and her brother and sister had understood, but it hadn't done much for the family togetherness aspect of the holiday.

As an adult, Leah, too, found herself on-call for the holidays. Babies didn't decide not to be born because it happened to be the fourth Thursday in November.

She knew that Schuyler would call to say hello, but she was privately relieved that she would not have to face her son in person. She no longer knew how to face herself. A baby had died because she had wanted to protect Schuyler. She could never regret helping her only son, not ever. But she also couldn't keep moving through life as if she'd done nothing wrong.

For a week after the death of Starr Manning's daughter, Leah didn't eat. For three days, she didn't sleep. Every time she blinked her eyes, she saw the infant's corpse.

On Thanksgiving, the world around her swirled with messages to be grateful and reflective.

She was grateful for Schuyler; she reflected that, as much as she loved her son, she had no business living while little Hope Manning McBain lay dead under Chloe Brennan's name.

By the time Schuyler called, she'd made her decision. When the small talk was over, she told him how proud she was that he had pulled his life together. She told him how she hoped that he would never let the mistakes he had made as a teenager hold him back; he was still so very young. She told him that she would always love him no matter where she was and that she had never regretted, not for a second, that she had been his mother.

"Mom?" Schuyler asked. "Is something wrong? Are you sick?"

_Sick in the heart. Sick in the head. _"No, Schuyler. I'm fine. A mother doesn't need to be sick to tell her son how proud she is of him."

"I guess I haven't given you many reasons to tell me that in the past few years," Schuyler said darkly.

"Don't ever think like that!" said Leah desperately. "What did I just say to you? Move forward. Live your life. Learn from your mistakes, but don't make yourself a slave to them."

"Are you sure you're okay?"

Apparently, there was a downside to Schuyler being clean. He had been significantly less perceptive and considerably more self-centered when he'd been an addict. "I told you I was, Schuyler."

"I could come out there," Schuyler decided. "I'll get on a plane tonight."

"That's not necessary. You can't fly on Thanksgiving, anyway."

"That's the day before Thanksgiving. The planes are usually pretty empty on the actual holidays."

"Schuyler," she told him in her firmest listen-to-your-mother voice, "stay where you are."

"See you tomorrow, Mom."

Leah groaned as she fingered her gun. She'd grown up around guns; her father had sheltered his daughters in most things, but he had been careful to instill a knowledge of and respect for potentially deadly weapons. Between those early lessons and her professional knowledge of anatomy, she was more than capable of ending her life swiftly and painlessly. There was no risk of merely paralyzing herself or damaging her brain.

But she could not take the risk of Schuyler being the one to discover her body. It might haunt him for the rest of his life. It might prompt a relapse.

She locked the gun away. She would take a day or two to convince Schuyler that everything was fine, and then she would complete the job. Then she would be free of the phantom presence of the little girl who should have lived.

_**TBC.**_


	5. Christina Comes Home

Schuyler had spent too much of his life as a screwup, and he'd let his mother protect him for far too long. He was determined to reverse that trend sooner rather than later.

"Mom?" he called as he barged into her apartment. "Are you home?"

"I told you not to come, Schuyler." Leah rushed out from her bedroom and enveloped Schuyler in a hug.

"I was worried. You sounded like crap." He evaluated her carefully. "You look like crap, too."

"Thank you, Sweetheart."

"When was the last time you slept?" Schuyler pushed.

"It's been a hard few days," Leah admitted.

Now they were getting somewhere. Schuyler plopped down on his mother's couch. "Hard, how? Work?" He figured that that had to be it. Since his father's death, his mother had been married to her work. Schuyler understood the appeal, though. Being a doctor wasn't just a job, or even a career. It was a calling. Leah Joplin held the lives of mothers and babies in her hands every day. For a long time, Schuyler had wanted to follow in her footsteps. If he was honest with himself, he still did. But a barely-reformed junkie had no business wielding a prescription pad.

"Work is fine," said Leah unconvincingly. "The facilities at Llanview Hospital are really very good."

"Did you lose a patient?" he asked softly.

Finally, Leah gave in and sank down beside him on the couch. "The mother was only sixteen years old. She had her head together, and her heart in the right place. She was going to give the baby up for adoption. She found a wonderful woman who couldn't have children. This girl stood up to everyone in her life to make the decision she thought was right. The baby's father dumped her. Her own father disowned her. Her high school principal wanted her expelled for setting a bad example. She stuck to her guns. She obviously didn't plan to get pregnant, but she had enormous strength of character. But the baby… the girl was tiny, and the baby was too big…"

"You lost them both?" Schuyler whispered.

"No. No." She waved her hand at Schuyler as if this were no big deal. "The girl lived. This was a long time ago. She must be married with half a dozen more children now."

"That isn't true," said Schuyler. "Why are you lying to me? What's special about this girl? What happened when she found out that her baby didn't make it?"

"You know doctors aren't allowed to discuss their patients' personal information."

Schuyler grew more concerned with each lame excuse. "Please. You've been telling me about your patients since I was four. You always get sad when you lose someone, but you know that it happens. It's what, six out of 1,000 babies in this country? And about one in 10,000 women?"

"You would have been a fine doctor," said Leah. "But what you're doing now, educating children, there's nothing in the world more important than that."

"Don't change the subject. Maybe you just need a vacation?"

"Good idea. I'll start looking into that."

"You do that," said Schuyler calmly. "I'm just going to go online and look through the Llanview death records for the past month and see about babies who-"

"_Don't you dare!" _He'd rarely seen his mother so terrified.

"Then tell me what happened."

"I want to keep you safe, Schuyler," Leah pleaded.

"Safe from what?"

"I don't know." Leah buried her face in her hands. "I don't know how he even found out about you."

"Well, at this point you need to tell me what you know. It's pretty clear I'd find something interesting if I went through the public records, right?"

"I wish you weren't so smart," said Leah.

"Tell me about the girl."

"Her father didn't want her to put the baby up for adoption. He knew about you- he knew about your problems in the past. The drugs. What I did to keep you out of prison to get you your second chance. Everything. He blackmailed me to tell his daughter that her baby died because he wanted to take the baby himself-"

"So tell the truth!" snapped Schuyler. "Worst case scenario, I lose my job. There are a lot of jobs out there. It's not worth this girl thinking her baby is dead."

"That's just it. She doesn't. That's what you'd find if you went through the records. This girl has a cousin who went into labor on the same day. The cousin is older, old enough to be having a baby. Widowed. She loved her late husband very much, and she couldn't take it when he died. She lost her grip on reality. She's in a mental institution. Her family is raising her older daughter. I had both of the babies with me when the younger girl's father snuck into the nursery."

"The guy who was blackmailing you."

"He said he'd changed his mind. He said he wanted his daughter to have her child. He said that if the baby died-"

"He'd ruin my life, blah, blah, blah."

"It's not funny, Schuyler."

"You switched the babies."

"Starr had sacrificed so much, and Jessica couldn't take care of the child she already had. Telling the truth now doesn't help anyone. Starr's father, he's in jail now, accused of kidnapping and rape. But his reach is far enough that he could kill you to get to me." She gazed off into the distance and looked older than Schuyler had ever seen her look. "I should have done a Caesarian on Starr. I didn't do it because it would have been almost impossible to fake the baby's death."

"Hindsight is 20/20. You don't know that Starr would have agreed to it, or that she wouldn't have gone into labor before you could schedule it, or that the C-section would have gone smoothly, or-"

"I don't want to feel better, Schuyler. I don't deserve to. I did not give that baby her best chance and I switched her with another little girl. And because I told you, you are now in as much danger as you ever were."

"No one knows that I know." Schuyler glanced wildly around the room. It was a relief to know that his mother made mistakes. It was mind-boggling to know that she had it in her to screw up _so badly_. "There has to be a way to undo the switch without making it look like you did it. We'll pay attention. We'll make sure that this guy is going to stay in jail."

"There are mistakes that can't be fixed."

Schuyler shook his head. His mother had always found a way to fix his mistakes. He would find a way to fix hers.

* * *

The first day of therapy was exhausting for Jessica, but not in the usual way. Over and over again, Dr. Levin put her under hypnosis and tried to coax out Tess. Over and over, there was no response.

"Normally, an alter like Tess wouldn't be able to resist taking the bait," he told Jessica. "Tess certainly was not shy about showing herself two years ago."

Jessica shrugged. It was the truth.

"We're going to take a few weeks to go through your memories with a fine toothed comb to make sure absolutely nothing is missing," Dr. Levin said. "That's the best sign of a true integration."

Jessica nodded. That was obvious.

"I'd like to try one more time to call Tess out, but without hypnosis. I'm going to do it by saying some things that will make you very angry. I won't do it if you think that that kind of exercise will make this less of a safe space for you."

Jessica shrugged again.

"I'm going to need a verbal response, Jessica."

"Go ahead," said Jessica. Sometimes words were hard when she was caught up in imagining what Chloe would have looked like, what Chloe would have been doing, how Chloe would have grown up.

"Are you sure?"

"I need to get better. I need to get home to Bree. I need to be safe around her," Jessica said.

"All right, then." A snarl crossed Dr. Levin's usually impassive features. "Nash is dead," he taunted. "Nash is dead and it wouldn't have happened if Natalie hadn't pretended that Jared was her uncle. Isn't that right?"

Jessica's heart sped up. "There's enough blame to go around. Natalie, Jared, Dorian." She swallowed hard. "Nash."

"It wasn't Nash's fault! It was Natalie. Natalie's little scheme killed your husband and now she gets to live happily ever after with Uncle Jared. No punishment. Don't you want her to pay for that?"

"I locked her in a room. I tortured her. I made her think her brother was dead. It went on for months."

"And at the end of those months, is Nash alive again?" He squinted at Jessica. "You must not have really loved Nash, if you can forgive his killers so easily."

Bile rose in Jessica's throat. "I loved Nash."

"Wouldn't Nash want you to avenge his death?"

"No. Nash wasn't perfect, but he would not want me to kill my sister. Even Tess knew that. Tess used to imagine talking to Nash before she started her plan to kill Natalie and Jared. The last time she saw him, he told her that he wouldn't visit her any more because he didn't approve."

"That's just something he had to say," concluded Dr. Levin with perfect illogic. "A person who loved him would have avenged him."

"I loved him."

"What about the baby? Did you love her, too?"

"_Shut up about Chloe!" _Jessica snapped. She leapt to her feet, pulse pounding in her throat.

"Tess?" Dr. Levin asked.

"Jessica," she corrected.

"Very good," said Dr. Levin quietly. "Exercise over. Did you feel Tess at all?"

"No."

"That anger was your own?"

"Yes."

"Are you angry that Nash died?"

"Yes."

"Are you angry that Chloe died?"

"Yes."

"Very good," Dr. Levin repeated. "That's it for today. Go and rest. You're required to attend meditation tomorrow morning, but no group until next week at the earliest."

"Thank you, Dr. Levin," she said. Tears made her vision blurry when she opened the door, and that was why she ran straight into Brody.

Brody's eyes widened. "I'm sorry, Jessica," he said politely. She found it oddly soothing that he hadn't gone for the inane "_are you okay?"_ when it was clear that she was not.

"No, I'm sorry," she said. "I think I ran over into your appointment time."

"I'm early. I took your advice yesterday. The sooner you start, the sooner it's over with, right?"

"Right." She forced a smile through her tears. "It's not that bad. This is progress, I swear."

"You're the expert."

"If only you knew how ridiculous the idea of me being an expert at _anything_ is."

"I doubt it," he said kindly.

She tried again to smile in return. "I'll be in the front lounge when you're done if you want to talk," she promised.

"I'll hold you to that."

By the time Jessica had stopped crying, washed her face, and brushed her hair (though she was half-tempted not to, just to see if Brody still liked her), it was almost time for dinner. She staked out an isolated table for two in the front lounge, propping a picture of Bree against her tray. If Brody decided not to join her, she would still be in good company.

"Is she yours?" Brody asked as soon as he sat down.

Jessica nodded. "This is Bree."

"Is she a good baby?"

"She was. But now… now it's like she doesn't even know me. Tess was out for months, and that's forever when you're Bree's age. And I don't really know her, either. They change so fast. She was into elephants six months ago, but maybe now she's into flowers. It must sound strange, saying I love this child so much when I don't even know her."

"Believe me, I'm one guy who gets it. That's how I feel about my… about my old girlfriend's kid. I only met him a few months ago, but it was amazing. He started hugging me and calling me 'dad,' and it just clicked. Right away. I never thought I'd be a good dad, but with Shane I did okay. You know, right up until I almost got him killed." Brody stabbed viciously at his dinner with his spoon (forks being limited, and knives not allowed at all).

Jessica hesitated. She didn't want to belittle what Brody had been through with Shane by one-upping him the way she had the day before. But it felt like a betrayal of Chloe not to mention her. "There's nothing worse than knowing you've put a child you love in danger."

"Did Tess hurt Bree?"

"No, thank God. But when you saw me crying earlier today…" She sniffled again. "I was pregnant again. I was three months pregnant when my husband died. Tess wasn't good at being pregnant. The OBGYN appointments were an inconvenience, so she didn't go. When the baby was born, she didn't cry, and I hoped it was nothing, but…" she trailed off before gathering herself for the final push. "Chloe died the day she was born."

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Jessica."

"It was my own fault. I have this whole other person inside of me who does things like try to kill my sister and let my daughter die. People try to tell me that it's not my fault, that it was all Tess, but that's a dangerous thing to say. It's not Tess. It's me."

"No." Brody shook his head. "Sometimes you're going along doing your own thing, and out of nowhere you just disappear."

She knew that he wasn't talking about her any more, not really. "Is that how you feel?"

His arms were folded defensively across his body. "Sometimes. It doesn't matter how I'm doing or what I'm feeling. All of a sudden, I'm right back in Iraq. I can smell it. I can hear it."

"That's awful."

"I used to drink. I'd start a fight, or drink 'til I passed out. Either way, problem solved. No more Baghdad. But then Gigi came back into my life and things changed. I had to stop with the drinking if I wanted to be around Shane, so I did. You have to have your act together if you're gonna be around a kid."

"I feel the same way. It's why I'm here. I'm not going to risk Tess being around Bree ever again." She rolled her eyes. "It must freak you out to know that some murderous personality could just pop out of me at any time. I bet you didn't realize that having dinner with me would be an act of courage."

Brody smiled. Gone was the anxiety. In its place was the man she imagined had frequented those bars. "Well, maybe I'm the daredevil type."

"There are safer hobbies," Jessica pointed out. "Like skydiving. BASE jumping."

"Been there. Done that."

It was all very clever and charming, it really was. But even skydiving and BASE jumping came with rules and precautions. Tess didn't. That was what made her so scary. "I'm… I think the technical term is _nuts_."

"Jessica." Brody was closer to her now. "I understand. I really do. Sometimes I see a little boy who isn't really there."

Her heart melted at the show of trust. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"About the fact that I see a little kid who doesn't exist? Not really. I just wanted you to know that you're not alone. We all go a little crazy sometimes. That doesn't mean you can't beat it."

"I thought I was integrated two years ago, but she came back."

"Integrated. You mean, like you got rid of her?"

"More like, she becomes a part of me. Alters are created when the host- that's me- can't deal with what they're feeling. I couldn't deal with Nash's death, so Tess came out."

"But you're dealing with your daughter's death."

"I don't know. Maybe. I can't trust my own perceptions at this point, you know?"

Before Brody could say that he did (after all, he was seeing things and he knew it), Sister Mary Eileen cheerily announced the annual showing of _Christina Comes Home For Christmas_.

"Too tired to stay up?" Brody asked, politely offering her an out.

"I'd rather not go to sleep. Afraid of waking up somewhere else and not knowing how I got there."

"I hear you."

"That boy you keep seeing?"

"It's worse in my nightmares, so I don't care if they're showing _Christina Comes Home From the Dentist_, I'm here."

They spent the next two hours sitting a quarter of an inch apart on the couch, occasionally giggling until the nuns shushed them. As Jessica watched Brody out of the corner of her eye in the flickering light of a black and white movie, she noticed, for the first time, how very attractive he was. It wasn't just the chiseled body that came along with a decade in the military. It was the line of his jaw, the shape of his hands, and the bright blue eyes. If she hadn't been mourning a dead husband and baby, it would have felt like a really good first date.

Nothing could ever come of it, of course. People who met in mental institutions didn't get together and live happily ever after. It was against the actual rules of St. Ann's as well as against the unwritten rules of common sense. Besides, she was still in love with Nash. Nash would always be the love of her life and she wouldn't make a mockery of that by moving on when Nash had been dead for less than a year.

But the warmth radiating off of Brody's body was tantalizing.

"Have you seen him?" she whispered. "The boy?"

"All clear," he said.

"Good." She might not be living happily ever after, but she was going to graduate from St. Ann's, and she was going to take this man with her.

_**TBC**_.


	6. Long December

**Part 6: Long December**

Cutting class had never been particularly taboo for Starr. She'd done it in elementary school when she'd felt her parents needed her supervision or when she'd plain old felt like blackmailing her teacher rather than going to school. She'd done it in middle school when the taunts about her family's very public drama had gotten to be too much. She'd done it her first week of high school, when she'd fallen for Cole at first glance and hadn't been able to stand the thought of being reduced in his eyes when he learned who and what she was. She'd cut an entire month of her sophomore year when she'd gotten pregnant and run away with Cole.

Not bothering with her junior year either would be doable. It had been one thing when she'd had Hope inside of her and needed to face down every demon in sight for the sake of the baby. Now that Hope was gone, Starr was just Starr again. The easy way out was looking awfully good.

It wasn't as if her mother would have time to notice, and her father was in jail.

"I'm not going," she told Langston when her best friend turned cousin stopped by her room, laptop in hand.

"Yes, you are," said Langston. "You've missed enough classes as it is."

"You're the brains in the family." Starr waved Langston along. "You go."

"You promised your mom you would be fine going back to school today," Langston pressed.

"What she doesn't know won't hurt her."

"She's going to find out."

"_You're _going to tell her?" Starr asked, letting her tone of voice imply the threat. Langston had done more for Starr in the last year than most best friends did for each other in a lifetime. But at the moment, Starr didn't care. She just wanted to… not be left alone, exactly. She just didn't want to go back to school like nothing had changed other than her profile.

"No, but eventually the principal will."

Starr rolled her eyes. "She's just glad I'm not there. She didn't like having a walking reminder that sometimes teenagers have sex in her school. She tried to have me thrown out."

"So why give her a real excuse to have you thrown out? Why are you letting her win? The Starr I know would fight."

"It's not worth it any more." Starr watched Langston carefully, wondering whether it was worth trying to explain. "About two days after we started high school, remember how you got us invited to the football team's party by telling everyone that my dad was the guy who was executed and then brought back to life that summer?"

"Yeah," Langston agreed.

"That party was the first time I really talked to Cole."

"I remember."

"And Brittany had to dump beer all over me to punish me for talking to this guy who was out of my league."

"Brittany did that because she was a jealous bitch. Cole was never out of your league."

Starr brushed that off. It wasn't really her point. "The next day, I cut school. My Aunt Viki walked into the kitchen and found me and I told her that I'd been fighting my whole life. Fighting to get my parents together. Fighting to keep my place in the family when Jack was born. Fighting to get Mom to accept Dad with a new face. Fighting Margaret Cochran. Fighting Spencer Truman. I was tired of fighting. I just wanted to be like everybody else. And you know what? I did it. I was sweet and good and normal. I pretended I was never into spiders and snakes and voodoo and finding naked men chained to wheels in abandoned funhouses."

"What?"

"Never mind. I bought the trendiest clothes. I got a football player boyfriend and I chose him over my family over and over. And where did that get me? Pregnant. Pregnant with a baby I had to give up."

"You didn't have to give Hope up, Starr. Even now, if you changed your mind, you have a whole list of people who-"

"I had to give her up, all right?" Starr shivered with the memory of looking at Hope and feeling like this wasn't the child she had carried for nine months. "She was meant to be with Marcie. And that was right, and I fought for that, and now I'm right back where I was when I started. I'm so tired of fighting. And I'm tired of being normal."

"I hate to break it to you, Starr," said Langston. "But I never thought you were normal. And I always knew biology was your favorite subject."

"Whatever." Starr flopped back against the pillows on her bed. "I haven't ever been alone for the last nine months and now I am. I put everything into being what Hope needed while she was with me, and now I'm tired. I don't want to walk in there with my head held high and tell everyone that Mrs. McBain is just so happy with her new daughter. I don't know how to walk in there and not be Cole's girlfriend or Hope's mother."

"So walk in there as Starr Manning."

"That's not enough."

"I bet it is," said Langston, and she pulled Starr to her feet, then shoved her in the direction of her car.

* * *

It was 8:00 in the morning and Blair's head already throbbed as if the day had been too long. Sam whined in his stroller and didn't stop until he was positive that he had his mother's undivided attention.

"You need to calm down, Blair," said Dorian in a falsely cheery voice. "He senses your mood. This appointment will be much more productive if the doctor doesn't have to evaluate his eyes through a temper tantrum."

"Thank you, Dorian," said Blair in the same falsely cheery voice. "Now that you mention it, I'll just be happy. Nothing to be upset about, really. I'm missing my daughter's first day back at school after she gives up my only grandchild for adoption because I have to take my son to see the doctor who is going to decide whether or not he needs surgery on his eye. And this afternoon I have to take my other son to visit his father in prison, after we have a long discussion about the concept of rape."

"If you want to focus on Starr and Jack, then let me handle Sam's appointment," Dorian suggested. "I'm a medical doctor."

Blair rolled her eyes heavenward. "I know."

"I'll be able to ask the right questions. That is why you asked me to accompany you in the first place, is it not?"

"Yes," she admitted.

"Then let me handle this one. Go see Starr, go get ready for Jack, go get a massage or visit Elijah."

"Have you been talking to Starr?" Blair demanded, not at all surprised that Starr would enlist Dorian in her plans to play matchmaker for Blair, but still irritated.

"Of course I've been talking to Starr, darling. She's my grandniece and we live in the same house," said Dorian, all innocence.

"Well, the next time you have a little chat with her, you can tell her that I am capable of managing my own love life and that Eli Clarke is not a part of it."

"Oh? Who is a part of it, then?"

"Nobody. That should make you happy. You've been telling me for years that I have terrible taste."

"Only insofar as it relates to Todd. I would never want you to be alone, Blair. I just want you to be free of that man."

Blair leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. "Never going to happen. We have three children together."

"You just had to make it three," Dorian whispered.

Blair glared hard at her aunt. "I'll make you a deal. I'll throw Sam on the mercy of the foster care system, and you can do the same with Langston. What do you say?"

"That's not what I meant."

Blair let it go, but she knew that Dorian didn't entirely approve of Blair's adoption of Sam. That was Dorian's problem. Blair wouldn't have been able to look herself in the mirror if she'd let her children's brother float off into the same nothingness that had nearly eaten her alive.

"It's really not what I meant, Blair," Dorian repeated. "Sam is here and we love him no matter who his biological parents were. The same as River. If he needs this surgery, we will get the best surgeon in the world. If it turns out that he just needs glasses, we will get him a different pair for every outfit so he always looks stylish."

Blair laughed. "I don't think Sam is too concerned with fashion."

"It's never too early to start," Dorian told her. "Besides, you have to admit, he'll look adorable with a pair of glasses on that little face."

* * *

Starr looked down the long hallway of Llanview High School and wondered why on earth she'd let Langston force her to come.

One day, she would invent a way to make herself invisible. But that day was a long way off.

"Hi Starr! Glad you're back! You look great!" Chelsea bounced up to Starr as Starr opened her locker. Starr looked frantically for Langston, hoping that her best friend would run interference, but Langston had been waylaid by Markko. Starr was on her own.

Chelsea was beloved by all of the teachers and most of the students because she was perpetually happy and cheerful. Starr knew that Chelsea was always happy because she loved nothing in the world as much as she loved gossip, and she got a steady diet of it in these very hallways. "My mom has some baby clothes from when my little sister was born last year. Would you like me to bring them in for you? They're almost new. They fit her for, like, five minutes, she grew so fast."

"I'm sure Mrs. McBain would appreciate it. I guess I can ask her if you aren't going to see her," Starr said.

"You really went through with the adoption?"

"I really did." Starr slammed her locker door shut.

"I was sure that once you saw the baby, you wouldn't be able to give her up. I mean, your family's rich. It's not like you would have had to drop out of school to raise your baby. You could have afforded a nanny."

It took all of Starr's concentration not to gnaw nervously on her bottom lip. Even people who barely knew her were telling her how weird it was that she hadn't fallen in love with Hope at first sight. "I wanted my daughter to have a fulltime mother. That's Mrs. McBain. It was hard, but I had to do what was best for her."

Chelsea nodded. "That was very brave of you. I still have Mrs. McBain's email address. I'll email her about the clothes." She skipped off down the hallway, no doubt ready to squeal to everyone she met that Starr really had gone through with it and given up her daughter. It was just as well. Maybe no one else would bother Starr if they'd already heard all about it from Chelsea. The stares and the whispers and the giggles would be no worse than the actual conversations.

She made it through her first three classes without much problem. Her heart sped up automatically in anticipation of biology. Biology was her favorite subject, Langston was right about that, but it came with the complication of being held at the same time as Cole's Spanish class. She and Cole had to walk past each other. During the autumn, Cole had always been careful to stop and talk to her, sometimes even taking her bag and helping her get settled in the lab. They hadn't been together, but she'd been carrying his baby, and he'd let everyone know that Starr wasn't in it alone.

Now, Hope was gone. Cole wouldn't have a sense of responsibility any longer. He would just have anger.

They locked eyes from opposite ends of the hallway, just as they always had. He stopped by the door to the bio lab, waiting for her just as he always had.

"How's your mom?" she asked, rather than waiting for him the speak first.

"She's terrible, thanks to your dad." Cole scowled.

Starr flinched. The story of Hope had gotten around the school already, but the story of Todd and Marty had not. So far, the whole thing had been kept out of the press because of the nature of the crime. "He's in jail," she said. "He can't hurt her anymore."

"What's it matter? Damage is done. He brainwashed her so bad she can't even remember me. John, either. She doesn't want to be with him. She just wants to drink and wear leather. Your family's a curse, Starr. I don't have my mother and I don't have my daughter and I don't have you."

"You were the one who broke up with me!" Starr objected.

"You didn't give me a choice. If we'd stayed together and had a couple more kids when you were good and ready, some day we would have had to tell Hope that we just didn't keep her because she was too much trouble."

"She has a mother and a father who love her and can give her things we can't."

"Keep telling yourself that, Starr. Keep telling yourself it wasn't just that you wouldn't let yourself be inconvenienced for your own daughter."

Cole left. His words chased himself around Starr's brain as she tried hard to listen to Dr. Burakazi. She gave it up as hopeless midway through the class. She would just have to get Langston's notes.

"One last thing," Dr. Burakazi said as they packed up their bags to go. "This will be our last month together. My wife is having a baby in January and I am going to take next term off to be with them."

The class tittered and looked at Starr.

"I don't know who the substitute will be yet, but I'm going to ask you to do some extra documentation of your work this month so that he or she can get a good idea of where you are right away. That's why those lab reports will absolutely be due at the end of the week, no exceptions."

Starr didn't feel like she was going to make it to January, anyway.

* * *

The doctor's appointment went as well as they could have hoped. Blair had first noticed Sam's left eye drifting off to the side two weeks ago, and his pediatrician had said that surgery might be necessary to correct the muscles behind the eye. The surgeon, though, was almost sure that the problem was just that Sam couldn't see properly and a pair of glasses would be all the remedy they needed.

They had to go to a store three towns away from Llanview to get a proper selection of toddler glasses. Sam hated them. He couldn't get them off and on by himself (which was, of course, the point) and he tried to throw every set of sample frames in grabbing distance to the floor.

Dorian gloated that clearly Sam placed a priority on fashion after all. They left having ordered half a dozen pairs of wire rimmed glasses that Sam would inevitably break, but it was better than surgery. Much better.

Sam and Dorian were dropped off at La Boulaie around lunchtime. Blair would have loved to have joined Sam in a nap or Dorian in a glass of wine, but visiting hours in the jail would be starting soon and she knew that Jack had to see his father one more time before the news broke. They were lucky that the latest in the saga of Todd and Marty had stayed private for as long as it had.

Jack met her in the principal's office and strapped himself solemnly into the front seat. Between Starr's and Sam's problems, Blair had barely gotten a chance to look at her middle child, let alone speak to him, for weeks. She watched him now and realized, with a jolt of fear, that she had no idea what was going on in his mind. She had never wanted a child of hers to slip through the cracks.

If only Todd had wanted that same thing.

"Aren't you going to ask why I pulled you out of school?" she asked Jack.

"You'll tell me if I need to know."

It warmed her heart. Starr had always been daddy's little girl, but Jack had always put his faith in Blair. "Thank you, Jack. You do need to know. There are a lot of things that you need to know. So if I'm going too fast for you, you need to ask questions or tell me to slow down. Okay?"

"Okay."

"We're going to go see your dad, but it'll be the last time you see him for a while. He hurt someone and he has to go to jail."

"Again?" asked Jack. It was the same thing Starr had said. Blair had no doubt that one day Sam would say it, too. The cycle would never change. Todd would never change. All the dreams that she had thought they had shared had been hers alone.

"Yes, again."

"He'll get out. He always does," said Jack.

"Maybe. But I think maybe not this time. He did something terrible. It's something you're going to hear about at school, like the story about him giving you away when you were a baby."

Jack sat upright. "Did he give Sam away?" he asked anxiously. He turned around and stared at Sam's empty carseat.

"No. No, Sam is at home with Aunt Dorian. Do you remember that Cole's mother died?"

"Yeah."

"It turns out that she didn't die. She was hurt very badly and no one knew it because your father kept her hidden and didn't tell anyone. She was hurt so badly that she didn't remember who she was."

"But he helped her get better, right?"

"In a way, yes. She's better in a lot of ways. She's back home with Cole. But the problem is that a very long time ago your father did something similar to her. He put her in a room and he wouldn't let her leave. He went to jail for that way back before Starr was born. It was before I ever knew him."

"Why does he want to spend all that time with her when he could be spending time with us? Does he love her more than us?"

Jack really was a child after Blair's own heart. How many times had she asked that question, not realizing that Todd would never love her the way she loved him? "What he did to her wasn't about love. It was about power. You know what rape is, Jack, don't you?"

"It's sex," said Jack with real assurance.

"It's a very bad kind of sex. Usually, when two people have sex, make love, they do it because they care for each other and they both decide to do it. They decide together. That's a good thing. That's something it's all right for grownups to do. Rape is when only one person wants to have sex and forces the other person to go along. Marty- Cole's mom- she didn't want to have sex with your dad and he made her. It's not okay. It's not something he ever should have done. That's why he was in jail before you were born and that's why he's in jail now."

Her entire body tensed as she waited for Jack's response. It couldn't be worse than Starr's. Starr had been about this age when she'd learned about Todd's past because Blair herself had accused Todd of rape. Starr had been disgusted… with Blair. She had continued to worship Todd, not batting an eye at the revelation. The bruises on her mother's arms had meant nothing; her father had been perfect in her eyes and that was that.

Jack was quiet for a long time.

"What are you thinking, Buddy?" Blair asked at last.

"I'm thinking of what I'm going to say to him," said Jack. "If it's going to be my last chance."

He didn't say another word until they were in front of Todd's cell.

"Jack, Sweetheart! This is a nice surprise," said Todd.

"Not for me," said Jack. "For me, a nice surprise would have been if you'd ever come to see me when you were holed up with Cole's mom."

"That's a misunderstanding," Todd told Jack.

"No, it's not," Blair interrupted. "In a couple of days, the headlines are going to say _Todd Manning Rapes Again_, and Jack needs to be prepared. I told him everything about you and Marty."

"Including what happened before he was born?"

"That too," interrupted Jack. "You know, that I wouldn't care about. It was a long time ago, like you giving me away was a long time ago. But if this is what you're doing now, we really should have kept Spencer Truman as my dad. I don't need you, and Starr doesn't need you, and Sam doesn't need you, and Mom _definitely_ doesn't need you."

Jack turned on his heel and regally asked the guard to let him out.

Blair tried to follow, but Todd called her back.

"The Spencer Truman thing was an inspired bit of meanness," he said. "But you can't make my son hate me, Blair. No matter how much coaching you do."

"That was all Jack. I didn't coach him. He's not Starr. He's not going to give you chance after chance."

"I won't be in here very long. I have a plan. So if I were you, I would think very carefully about what you do next."

* * *

It was late that night when Blair banged on Eli's hotel room door.

"Blair," he said with surprise. "To what do I owe this visit?"

"Less talking," she told him. "More doing." She pushed him against the wall and kissed him deeply. All of her thoughts and feelings were safely locked away and nothing was left but the physical.

Luckily, Eli was good at the physical.

_**TBC**_.


	7. The Z-Box is Coming

**Part 7: The Z-Box is Coming**

Brody hadn't thought he was allowed visitors yet, so he was surprised when he came into the common room to find Gigi waiting for him. "Shane wanted to be absolutely sure that you got your Christmas card in time, so I promised to bring it down here in person," she said by way of explanation. "It didn't go in the mail last week because he drew it himself, and of course it had to be perfect."

Brody smiled as he unfolded the card. Shane had a gift when it came to drawing; he really did. "How's he doing?"

"He misses you," said Gigi. "Things are still going… slow with Rex."

"I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault."

"I didn't help. Thank God I didn't actually kill Rex, but-"

"You were sick," said Gigi firmly. "I know that, Rex knows that, and Shane knows that. I told Shane about you every day of his whole life. It's no wonder he feels like Rex is some kind of an interloper. And Rex is so anxious to get things right that it almost makes things worse, you know? You know Shane. He likes the video games, he'll be happy to play one, but they aren't a big thing for him. If money is tight, and money has always been tight, he'd rather have a new set of colored pencils and some good sketch pads. But this year the big present, the thing it's hard to get for kids, is the new Z-Box. And Shane announced that he wants one, and I really think he's only doing it to test Rex. So of course there's no way to get one. Adriana's bitch of a mother was rubbing it in Rex's face that she has _two_ for her spoiled little grandnephews and she won't sell him one for Shane and he's just…" Gigi trailed off in disgust.

"Can't anyone help you? You know some pretty well connected people."

"There's nothing anyone can do." Gigi shook her head and stood to leave. "But thanks for listening. And I'm going to bring Shane to visit just as soon as you and the doctors give the okay."

With the card in his hand, Brody attended his first group therapy session. Dr. Levin pushed Jessica to begin, but Jessica, quiet and withdrawn, declined. Brody glanced down at Shane's picture and decided that he could push himself and spare Jessica all at once.

"I'll give it a go," he said. Dr. Levin tried to hide his surprise. Brody had made an effort in his private therapy sessions, but he knew that he was less than a model patient. Therapy was a new experience for him, and talking about himself for hours on end without regard to the other person in the room seemed unnatural.

Brody held up the card, complete with Shane's picture, for all to see; Shane's artistic talent should be shared far and wide, as far as Brody was concerned. "I got this today. You see this boy here? He made it for me himself. I really loved him. I thought of him as my son."

Barb jerked in her seat. "That's the boy he kidnapped! He shot his father." She twisted to look at Dr. Levin. "Why isn't he in lockup? He could snap and kill us all!"

Dr. Levin moved quickly to quiet Barb, but Brody wasn't bothered. In a way, he appreciated Barb's honesty more than the platitudes that were usually sent his way. So help him, he was getting used to Saint Ann's. "It's okay," he said. "I'm not going to shoot anybody. But you're right. I did. I was pretty messed up. I thought I was going to lose Shane to his real dad, and I lost it. Shane's dad was just trying to protect Shane and his mom from me. I took my service pistol and I shot him. I'm lucky to be here, I know that. I could be doing real time right now, but I never meant to hurt anybody. I just couldn't stand to lose Shane. Not just because I loved him. I did. I still do. But when I pulled the trigger that day, I was seeing… I was trying to change what happened to another little boy."

"Are you sure you're ready to talk about this, Brody?" Dr. Levin asked.

He didn't have a clue, but moving forward, even in the wrong direction, seemed better than staying still. "Maybe if I talk about it to someone, maybe it'll get easier. Maybe it'll be something I can live with. It won't keep me up all night and be with me every hour I'm awake. When I was in combat in Iraq, I shot and killed a kid. Everybody told me I was right to do it, but that boy's parents lost their son. They're suffering now because of me. All I can figure, after being here, is that I was so desperate to hold onto Shane because of this other little boy. Thinking that, I don't know, I could make this kid's life better instead of taking his life. When I was with Shane, I didn't even have to think about it. But then, when I knew I was gonna lose him, it all got jumbled up in my head. I was back in Iraq."

The Iraqi boy seemed to take that as an invitation. Gun in hand, he stood behind Dr. Levin and stared insolently at Brody. Brody couldn't help but stare back.

"Are you all right?" asked Dr. Levin. "What do you see?"

Jessica was glancing back and forth between Brody and the boy. "Maybe it's someone else's turn," she suggested, clearly having guessed exactly what- who- Brody was looking at.

He waved off the lifeline Jessica was offering. "No. I want to talk about it." The words came out in hard, short sentences. "There was an IED- an improvised explosive device- that killed some guys in our convoy. I was in the tank right behind them. I saw the whole thing. Then somebody started shouting that the guys who planted it were in a house right off the road. We moved in. We discovered three insurgents and subdued them. We thought the area was secure. I was the last one left. I heard a noise behind me. I fired. He fell. I realized I had shot him. I didn't hear any other sounds. No shouts no guns. That's when I realized who it was. A little boy. Maybe ten, eleven years old. And he was lying there, silent. After I shot that boy, I couldn't hear anything. No shouting, no guns, no buddies, nothing. It was like everything else disappeared. It was just me and this little kid who didn't yell or scream or cry anymore. I wanted that kid to cry, so I'd know I didn't kill him. But he didn't. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"Are you okay, Brody?" asked Dr. Levin when his story was over.

"Except my buddies, I never told anybody about it like that. I think it helped." He wasn't sure it had helped, yet, but he knew that he was following the rules and that was something. You didn't spend your entire adult life in the military without getting a certain comfort out of following the rules.

"That took a lot of guts, telling everybody like that. Good job, Brody." Dr. Levin switched his attention back to his original target. "Maybe you'll feel like sharing next time, Jessica."

Jessica didn't answer. She appeared to be a million miles away.

"Jessica?" Dr. Levin tried again.

She shook herself physically. "Yeah. I was just thinking about Brody's story. It was so sad."

Dr. Levin seemed to accept that. He and the other patients filed out, and Brody moved closer to Jessica. "It's just me now," he said. "What's going on? You went somewhere, and it wasn't because you were sad about my story."

"It's a sad story," Jessica pointed out stubbornly.

"One you've heard before."

"Not in that much detail."

"What were you thinking?" he repeated.

"When you talked about wanting the little boy to cry," Jessica said at last. "Chloe didn't cry when she was born. That's when I knew something was wrong. They told me, 'she's breathing, she has a pulse, sometimes babies just don't cry right away.' It's… sometimes it's really hard to think about going home and not having her be there. Sometime this week, Natalie took Bree to sit on Santa's lap. Chloe should have been there, too. You know better than most people. There's nothing worse than the death of a child."

Dr. Levin ducked back into the room. "Brody, my office, please. Jessica, go and get some rest and think about what you will be contributing to group tomorrow."

Brody had no choice but to obey, although he would have preferred to stay with Jessica. He was getting used to Saint Ann's, but Jessica, even with the threat of her murderous extra personality, still struck him as the most rational person there. Jessica was someone he would have liked to have gotten to know on the outside.

"Am I in trouble?" Brody asked as he shut himself into Dr. Levin's office.

"No. But you made such enormous and unexpected strides in group that I wanted to offer you an extra session to make sure you were able to step down from that kind of emotional peak in a safe place."

Brody shrugged. "I don't really have anything else to say."

"In that session today, did you see the boy? The boy you shot in Iraq?"

Brody had been packed off to a mental institution, but at least he had been packed off to a mental institution where the doctor knew his shit. "I see him everywhere now."

"When did you start seeing him?"

"As soon as I got home." Memories of bar fights and drunken nights with women he didn't know flooded his mind. "But it stopped when I came here and found out Shane thought I was his dad. I thought that was gonna be it. I thought I was gonna have this great life, this great family. No more visions, or whatever."

"Did they start again when you discovered that you were going to lose Shane to his biological father?"

"Yeah," Brody admitted.

"Throwing yourself into a parental role with Shane may have been your way of avoiding what happened in Iraq."

Brody had said almost the same thing not an hour before in group, but that didn't mean Dr. Levin got to say it. "I love Shane. I wanted to be a great dad to him."

"I'm not saying you didn't, or weren't. But is it also possible that you were trying to make up for what you did to that little boy in Iraq? If you don't face your guilt, Brody, the boy you killed will never stop haunting you. This is not about Shane. This is about that other little boy. It was war. The rules are different."

As if Brody hadn't started hearing that from Wes and his other teammates before the boy's body had had a chance to get cold. "That doesn't make me any less guilty. I pulled the trigger. I killed an innocent kid."

"You keep saying that child was innocent, and all children are to some extent, but this one had a gun. If you hadn't fired, you might be dead."

More platitudes from the Wes Granger handbook. "I've tried thinking about it that way."

"It doesn't help?"

It didn't.

* * *

Blair only had one problem with the Christmas season, and that problem was that Christmas reminded her of Todd. She shared three children with Todd and had loved him for half of her life, so it was understandable that most things reminded her of Todd.

But Christmas was worse. Christmas was where everything had begun for them in so many ways.

She glared at the pile of wrapped presents that were neatly stacked beneath La Boulaie's ornate Christmas tree. Todd could take her beautiful memories of their life together and turn them into something ugly, something she had made up in her head instead of something they had shared. Todd could take away Starr and Jack's innocence by pushing them into experiences they weren't ready to have. Todd could even take away Hope, their first grandchild; there was not a doubt in Blair's mind that Starr's decision to give Hope to Marcie was a gesture grounded more in vengeance than justice.

She would be damned if Todd was going to take away Christmas, too.

She pulled out her phone and texted Eli: _Busy_?

He answered right away: _Just working on my briefs._

She rolled her eyes. She supposed he did write legal documents from time to time, but he was likely just holding the door open for her to proposition him with that turn of phrase. Even though it was a cliche, it would be rude to refuse: _Briefs? I'm disappointed. Prefer commando._

_That can be arranged._

_Arrange it now._

_Where?_

_My house._

_Really? You're going to start showing me off?_

_No one is here. Have a cab drop you off._

_How will I get home?_

_Maybe I'll just keep you in my room as my love slave._

_Be there in ten._

He made it there in seven. He was wearing a garish tie patterned with Christmas ornaments. She grabbed it. "Okay if I tie you to my bed with this?" she asked.

He pretended to consider. "That's my favorite tie."

"Then it's a damn good thing I'm in this for your body and not your taste."

If Eli was offended, it didn't show in his performance.

Then, too close for comfort, a door slammed. "_Blair_!" came Dorian's voice.

Blair looked at the clock. Dorian was several hours early. "Shit," she hissed. Eli was already untangling his wrists from the tie (games aside, deep down, Blair didn't like the idea of tying someone up so he couldn't release himself). "Get in the bathroom!" she ordered, and Eli complied just before Dorian banged into Blair's bedroom without knocking. Blair hastily rearranged the covers to conceal both her naked body and as many of Eli's clothes as she could find.

"Blair." This time, Dorian seemed more concerned and less annoyed. "What are you doing in bed in the middle of the day? Are you sick?"

"Just tired," Blair murmured, trying to sound groggy.

"Depressed is more like it." Dorian sat down on the edge of Blair's bed. "I know you've had a hard few months, but you can't keep letting Todd get to you this way."

"I know. You're right," said Blair obediently.

"There is no good reason for a healthy woman to be in bed in the middle of the day," Dorian repeated, seeming surprised to get complete agreement from Blair. "Well, there's one very good reason but we both know you've been refusing to take advantage of _that_. You should have taken Elijah for a spin when you had the chance. Tall, dark, handsome, educated- I even heard him speak French once."

"Todd speaks French, too," Blair pointed out irritably.

"And Elijah Clarke is not Todd Manning. The very best point in his favor."

"You didn't come in here just to talk about Eli, did you?" Blair had to get Dorian off the subject of Eli. She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Eli was listening at the door (who wouldn't?) and was richly tempted to make a grand entrance clad only in his hideous Christmas tie. "You said you'd be shopping at least until the girls and Jack got home from school."

"I ran into that miscreant Rex Balsom and it ruined my mood."

Blair understood how that could happen. Rex had been one of a parade of people who had lied, cheated, and schemed to make sure Marcie kept Sam away from the family he'd been born to. "When Rex ruins my mood, I like to grab him by his hair until he runs out of the room."

"Yes, I remember when you did that. It was rather uncouth."

"So what happened today?"

"I was innocently sipping my cafe au lait in the coffee shop after I stopped by the jewelry store. Wait until you see what I got the girls. _Magnifique_! Sometimes you have to check in at the last moment in case there was a late delivery, you know. But in stomps Rex Balsom, complaining to his sister Natalie and anyone else who would listen that he can't find a Z-Box for that snot-nosed brat of his. Imagine! Looking for a Z-Box two days before Christmas! They were almost impossible to get last month when I special ordered Jack's and Sam's from my friend in London."

"I'm just going to assume that you quietly left the coffee shop and didn't confront Rex."

Dorian laughed. "No. That girl who works at the hospital- Melanie, I think her name is, she saw us with Sam when we went to get his eye examined- made it her business to tell Rex that I had two Z-Boxes and that Sam isn't old enough to enjoy his. Rex demanded that I sell him Sam's Christmas present. Can you imagine that? Naturally, I told him it was karmic justice for the way he treated Adriana. He started into his sob story about what a rough year poor, poor Shane is having. Not that I disagree. Rex Balsom is certainly a step down from Brody Lovett in the father department. But if any two boys in this world deserve to be spoiled this Christmas, those boys are Jack and Sam. What they've gone through with their father and their sister, Sam getting uprooted from one home after another and Jack getting old enough to face some very hard truths… if I want to spoil my grandnephews, I will. It's none of Rex Balsom's business. I don't care if all Sam does is use that controller as a teething ring. Jack will understand that I thought of each of them separately, and that's important for a middle child who's afraid of being lost in the shuffle."

"I agree, Dorian."

"If Rex wanted his son to have a Z-Box, Rex should have thought ahead."

"If we're going to continue this discussion, maybe we can do it downstairs when I've had a chance to get dressed?" Blair pleaded.

"Of course, darling. I can't show you the necklaces because I had them wrapped, but-"

"Whatever it is, I'll come see it in a few minutes."

"All right." Dorian caressed Blair's hair. "But if I catch you hiding out in your room again, I will remove you by any means necessary."

As soon as Dorian was gone, Blair jumped out of bed and locked the door. She wasn't sure why she hadn't locked it in the first place. The fear of getting caught was definitely a turn-on, but actually getting caught would have been awkward.

"All clear," she said to Eli. "I'm going to call the cab company, and you can go down the back stairs and meet the cab at-"

Eli, half-dressed, struck a pose against her dresser. "Why didn't you take that nice Elijah for a spin? Tall, dark, handsome, educated. Et il parle francais."

"Shut up," Blair suggested, but there was no bite to her words.

"You have to admit, it's kind of funny that we're hiding from your family who completely approves of me."

"We're hiding _because_ they'd approve. I wouldn't want to get their hopes up that this is something real when all it is is fun."

"It doesn't have to be that way. We could have an actual conversation now and then."

Blair shook her head. "That isn't what we agreed to."

"It wasn't an ironclad contract. I distinctly remember that I signed nothing."

Blair couldn't believe what she was hearing. Eli was younger, and a man, and came with no baggage that she could discern. (He had a point, though; she'd never really asked.) If any human being on the planet should have been a candidate for no strings attached stress relieving sex, it should have been Eli.

"Think about it," he said as he tossed his jacket over his shoulder. "Not that you asked, but I'm flying to Tahiti tonight to be with my brother and my niece for the holiday. My brother can be a hard guy to deal with, but he doesn't deserve the problems he's been having with his wife. I'll be back after New Year's."

And Eli was gone.

_**TBC**_


	8. Happy New Year

**Part 8: Happy New Year**

Christmas went as well as Blair could have hoped. Jack and Sam put aside the upheavals of the past year and dove into their presents. (Rex Balsom's concerns aside, Sam proved more adept at managing his Z-Box than any of the adults in the family. In no time at all he was alternating between a drawing game and one that required him to find hidden cartoon teddy bears.) Langston remained flattered and disbelieving at Dorian's attentions. And Starr, while obviously troubled, put on a cheerful face and expressed admiration for the clothing and jewelry that covered her section of the room.

Mid-morning, the doorbell rang and Blair answered it to find a delivery man laden with packages. She signed for them without giving it much thought; shopping was a major Cramer family activity, and it was hardly surprising that someone had arranged for holiday delivery. It wasn't until Starr drifted into the hallway and examined the packages that Blair realized that she should have looked before she signed.

"They're from Dad," said Starr with disgust.

It twisted Blair's heart. There had been years when she had wished that her little girl's preference for her father over her mother hadn't been quite so well-defined. Now she knew that watching Starr lose Todd was infinitely worse.

"What do you think?" she asked Starr, since they had become allies in the worst possible way.

Starr took a deep breath and let it out. Blair could see Starr willing herself to make the mature decision, as she had done over and over again during the past year. "I'm not going to accept mine. Not after what he was going to do to Hope. But the boys should open theirs."

Blair was going to ask Starr what, exactly, Todd had planned to do to Hope, but Jack chose that moment to pipe up from the doorway.

"I'm not taking mine," he said. "I don't want it. And Sam doesn't want his, either."

Dorian had followed Jack. "You should have a ceremonial burning."

Jack's eyes widened with delight. "Are there still fireworks in the attic? Could we blow them up out in the backyard?"

Dorian appeared to give Jack's idea real consideration. "If we don't know what's in there, that could be dangerous," she decided. "But I admire your initiative, young man."

Jack sighed heavily. "I guess they could go to the homeless shelter?" he asked.

"That's a beautiful idea, Jack," Blair told him. Dorian and Starr agreed, a whole family united around Blair.

It wasn't a victory. It was just sad.

New Year's was supposed to be a time for changes and beginnings, but Blair didn't foresee 2009 being any different from 2008. She would lose Eli when she told him that she absolutely could not have a relationship that was anything other than physical while her children's lives were in disarray.

* * *

Christmas went as well as Jessica could have hoped. Christmas without Bree was always going to be a horrendous experience, and Jessica lowered her expectations appropriately. The nuns required everyone to gather for dinner, of course, but she and Brody escaped with their dessert plates to a quiet corner of the common room.

"How are you holding up?" asked Brody, ever attentive.

"Doing the best I can," she said honestly. "You?"

"It's not like I really have a place to go on the outside. It's not as bad for me as it is for you."

"You must have somewhere you want to be," pushed Jessica. The alternative was too terrible. "Drinking with your buddies and making fun of the people who are running around being completely sappy at least."

"We don't do that!" Brody objected. "At least, not much."

"And your sister. I know you aren't close, but you'd at least call her, wouldn't you? If you could?"

"Yeah. Or she'd call me."

"And even though Shane isn't your real son, I know he'd want to see you today if he could."

"Of course."

"There you go," Jessica concluded. "Don't tell me that there aren't people out there missing you. Bree's probably not even missing me. She's too little to remember last Christmas. Nash strung these lights right outside the window and Bree and I sat there and watched them for hours. I wanted to make it a tradition this year, something Bree and Chloe and I all did together. But Chloe's gone and Bree doesn't care. And you know what? I don't even know where Nash put those lights. I might never find them."

"If you don't find those lights, you'll find other ones. That's the nice thing about light. It's always different, but it's always the same, too. You can look at the same stars from the middle of the Pacific Ocean or from some town in Michigan, and even though you know they're the same they look completely different. But the star we had on the top of our Christmas Tree growing up, I'm sure we changed out the red and green lightbulbs a dozen times but it always looked the same."

Jessica smiled at the comparison. It was one Nash would have appreciated. "You know, I think Nash would have liked you. Don't get me wrong. You're completely different. Nash was an artist, always looking for an angle to run a scam if he needed to. You're so law and order. You worry about the greater good. I could never imagine you doing some of the things Nash did. But he would have liked you. I'm sure of it."

Brody nodded, accepting the compliment for what it was.

"So you went with a star on top of your tree, not an angel?" Jessica asked.

"Always," Brody agreed.

"We usually did too. I think my favorite was the year Kevin and Joey and I orchestrated this whole tree-decorating scheme to get our parents back together."

"Kevin and Joey are your brothers who live in London now?" Brody asked.

"Yeah. And there's one more, Cord."

"Cord?" Brody ran his finger along the extension cord that lit Saint Ann's own decorations.

Jessica laughed. "_Cordero_. His mother was Mexican. It's a sad story, actually. Our dad was in love with his mom, completely. But when our grandfather found out that she was pregnant, he paid her to leave town. He said that there was too much prejudice in the world and it would ruin my dad's life to have a half-Mexican son, especially so young."

"That's harsh." Brody looked suitably taken aback.

Jessica grinned. "Did you think you were the only one with a screwed up family and we were all sweetness and light until I tried to kill my twin sister? Grandpa could be a cruel man. He did some terrible things. I'm not under an illusions about that. But he was always good to me. He could be so generous with his family." She held up a hand to stave off the protest that Brody's raised eyebrow seemed to imply. "Mom already had Kevin and Joey when she and Dad got together. She was widowed really young with two little boys. Dad adopted them and they don't remember a time when he wasn't their father. Now, you would have thought that Asa Buchanan, the man who threw his first grandson away, would not approve. And you'd have been completely wrong. No one would ever have guessed that Kevin and Joey weren't his flesh and blood. They were Buchanans through and through. They got the trips to the ranch in Texas and the guns and the horses and these long thundering lectures about how they were _Buchanans_!"

"I hadn't quite pegged you as the guns and horses type."

"We're blueblood on Mom's side," said Jessica bluntly. "Texas oil on Dad's. I'm pretty much all Lord, though. I certainly hope so, since it turns out that not only are Kevin and Joey not Dad's biological children, neither am I. My biological father was a complete psychopath who raped my mother."

"That's terrible."

"And the really fun thing is that my mother got pregnant with twins. Natalie got the good seed and I got the bad seed. But Natalie was stolen at birth so none of us ever knew until she turned up." She rolled her eyes at Brody's stunned expression. "Between my murdering alternate personality and my family history, are you sure you don't want to run away now?"

Brody leaned back in his seat. "Why would I do that? This is just getting interesting."

"I think it's been interesting enough for one day," Jessica decided. She could talk about her parents and her grandparents and Kevin and Joey and Cord.

With Natalie, it was still too hard.

"The disease, dissociative identity disorder, it's not really hereditary but my mom has it too. Sometimes you don't inherit the things you want from your parents. I wanted her grace and her class and her brains and her beauty and her kindness."

"You have every one of those things," said Brody.

Jessica shrugged. "I didn't want this disease. I didn't want to be a young widow like her, with two babies. But hey, be careful what you say you don't want, because I ended up a widow with one baby."

"Jessica."

"There's nothing you can say. It's stupid, but for a minute there when Nash first died my mom sat with me and talked about what a horrible parallel it was. Her, with Kevin and Joey and no father and me with Bree and Chloe and no father. And this is the stupid part. I was grieving Nash so hard I literally lost my mind, but in that one minute I imagined finding a man who would be for Bree and Chloe and me what my dad was for Kevin and Joey and my mom. And we'd have one more baby, a boy, just like Mom and Dad had me. This perfect lockstep parallel to prove that I'm my mother's daughter."

New Year's was supposed to be a time for changes and beginnings, but Jessica didn't foresee 2009 being any different from 2008. No matter how many times Dr. Levin hypnotized and tested her, there was no sign of Tess. Jessica could talk about every agonizing moment in her life other than the ones that involved the sister she'd nearly killed. And without that, she knew she'd be in Saint Ann's forever.

* * *

Christmas went as well as Starr could have hoped. She managed to keep Marcie from bringing Hope to visit and reminding Starr in person of everything she had lost.

She'd lost Cole.

She'd lost her father.

She'd lost daughter.

In the back of her mind, Starr had never really come to terms with giving Hope up for adoption. In the back of her mind, _something_ always happened that allowed her to end up with Hope and Cole as a happy family. Now she was face to face with real life. Neither Cole nor Todd was ever going to forgive Starr, and Starr was going to have to deal with that because she knew that Hope was in a better place.

She was privately proud of Jack when he refused to open the presents their father had sent, but her pride washed away in a wave of misery when Marcie started emailing her pictures. Hope in a Santa hat. Hope staring at the lights on the Christmas tree. Hope watching with wide eyes as Michael unwrapped a present for her. Hope in Cole's arms; evidently, Cole had not rejected Marcie's offer to spend part of the day with her.

The odd thing was that in Starr's mind's eye, Hope had been a little blonde towhead like Starr herself had been. In reality, Marcie's daughter had light brown hair and sharp features. That helped remind Starr that her fantasy of a life with Cole and Hope had been just that: a fantasy.

It sucked when a fantasy died.

New Year's was supposed to be a time for changes and beginnings, but Starr didn't foresee 2009 being any different from 2008.

When the school year resumed, Starr walked into the biology lab without meeting Cole's eyes. She didn't want to hear about how Cole and Hope had spent Christmas. She did a double take when she saw the young man sitting on Dr. Burakazi's desk. Dr. Burakazi had announced that a substitute would be taking over his classes for the rest of the year, but he hadn't hinted that the substitute would be barely older than the students themselves.

Starr studied the man carefully. Perhaps he wasn't the new teacher at all? Perhaps he was a transfer student intent on making his mark by getting detention on the first day?

"Hi," the man said when he noticed that Starr, and several of her classmates, were staring. "I'm Schuyler Joplin. I'll be your teacher for the rest of the year."

* * *

Christmas went as well as Brody could have hoped. At least it was better than Thanksgiving. He was still in a mental institution, but he had learned the ropes and made a friend in Jessica. The two of them spent Christmas dinner exchanging childhood memories, and a few more recent ones too. He had had worse Christmases with worse company.

But when it came to the reason he had been committed to Saint Ann's to begin with, his progress had stalled. He was no closer to knowing why the dead boy haunted him than he had ever been.

"I'd like you to have a conversation with your friend Wes," said Dr. Levin when they met a few days after the holiday. "His testimony helped have you placed here rather than sent to Statesville. It might help you to talk to someone who was there when the boy died."

Brody had talked to Wes at the time. It hadn't helped.

New Year's was supposed to be a time for changes and beginnings, but Brody didn't foresee 2009 being any different from 2008.

* * *

Christmas went as well as Tea could have hoped. Her marriage to Ross had started to crumble as soon as she'd gone back to work. Going back to work, too, had left her with less and less time for Dani. Tea had flown home from South America (her client had been wrongfully imprisoned in a Colombian prison for years due to lack of a defense, and she wasn't going to let anyone make her feel guilty about taking him on) in mid-December and found herself presented with a child she did not recognize.

Her previously sweet, easygoing Dani was angry and snappish and sarcastic. Dani pretended that Tea wasn't in the room but jumped at Ross' command. In her life, no one person had ever made Tea feel as much a failure as Dani suddenly did.

Well, there was one person.

Todd Manning.

Ironic, then, that she had once wondered if Todd might have been Dani's father. As she looked at Dani's surly face across the dinner table, she wondered again. Ross was aggravatingly content to live a small, meaningless life in Tahiti. Could a man with so little drive for fortune and fame, a man who was content to live out his life as a beach bum, possibly have fathered a fiery, rebellious girl like Daniela had suddenly become?

She took it as a sign when she received a call telling her that Todd Manning of Llanview, Pennsylvania had requested her services. Tea laughed when she heard that Todd required a defense against charges of rape. She had suffered through two celibate marriages to Todd. She had begged him to join her in bed (or on the couch, or on the floor, or up against the wall, or bent over a table) and had been rebuffed over and over. She'd even asked him to rape her, if that was what turned him on. When they'd finally come together on the island, it had lasted for only a moment and he'd left almost immediately.

He wasn't interested in sex. Defending him would be a snap, a new feather in her cap as she tried to reestablish her career after taking some time off to get Dani's life on track.

And seeing him again would allow her to test her new, disturbing theory about Dani.

Before 2008 was out, she returned to Llanview for the first time in many years. She ran a quick Llanet search to familiarize herself with Todd's new life- perhaps most importantly, his new face. When she saw him again, she would not allow herself to be shocked. She would be in control the way she never had been during their marriages.

"Tea Delgado," he said when he saw her coming. He was alone in a jail cell, thin and worn. A bandage covered half of his face.

"Surprised?" she asked, hoping that he was. She hadn't confirmed that she was coming. "Funny. Whole new face. Only I'd recognize you anywhere. Even with that bandage. And from what I've been reading, your face is the only thing that's changed."

New Year's was supposed to be a time for changes and beginnings, and Tea Delgado was going to make 2009 a banner year for herself and for Todd.

_**TBC**_


	9. Visiting Night

**Part 9: Visiting Night**

The first Tuesday of 2009 wasn't a visiting day, but to Brody's surprise he was summoned to the visiting room nonetheless. Dr. Levin met him there.

"I've arranged for you to have a discussion with your friend Wes this morning in place of your usual therapy session," said Dr. Levin without preamble.

Brody clenched his jaw. It wasn't that he didn't want to see Wes; Wes was the closest thing to a brother he would ever have. But he didn't like to have even more of his life removed from his own control.

"Now that you're talking about what happened, I think it will be useful for you to talk about it with someone who was there."

"We tried that at the time," said Brody darkly.

"You're in a different place now. What's the worst that could come from trying again?" Dr. Levin was, it seemed, determined to make sure that the new year got off to an intimidating start.

_The only easy day was yesterday_, Brody thought to himself, quoting myriad SEAL teammates and instructors.

"We don't really have to do this," was the first thing Brody said to Wes when Dr. Levin left them alone.

Wes looked about as uncomfortable as Brody had ever seen him, and Brody had seen Wes in some very uncomfortable situations. "I don't want to do anything that doesn't help you get better," Wes said at last. "I always tried to do what I thought was best for you. You know that, right?"

Brody watched Wes carefully. "Of course."

"What do you remember about what happened?"

That was a weird question. "The same thing I always did. I shot that kid. That innocent kid." Brody made himself stare at Wes instead of at the ceiling. "Dr. Levin says I keep harping on the kid being innocent, even though he had a gun."

If Brody hadn't been to hell and back with Wes, he wouldn't have noticed the flinch. It was something about that flinch that brought his mind back to Iraq yet again. For the thousandth time, he saw the boy, still and silent.

And without a gun.

"He didn't have a gun," said Brody frantically. "He didn't have a gun. But he had to have a gun, I know he had a gun, we all saw it. Everyone signed the report. You showed me the gun, you shoved it right in my face and you told me- but he didn't have a gun." Brody stood up and pushed his hands against his head, trying to push the conflicting memories together. "But-"

"Sit down," said Wes quietly, and Brody obeyed. "The kid in Iraq. He was unarmed."

"I saw the gun!" Brody yelled, on his feet again.

"You saw what I wanted you to see." Wes turned away from Brody and leaned against the wall. "I'm sorry, man. I'm so sorry."

"There was no gun?" Brody asked. He couldn't decide which answer would be worse. If there was no gun, he had murdered an unarmed child and had, through his weakness, forced all of his teammates to perjure themselves to protect him.

But if there was no gun, everything made sense.

He didn't need Wes to answer.

"There was no gun," Brody whispered, more to himself than to Wes.

"I never wanted you to go through this," said Wes.

"Go through what? Going crazy?"

"You're not crazy."

"But I saw it. I saw the gun."

"I know you did."

Brody was on the edge of something bad and he knew it. He grabbed Wes, hard, by the arms. "You have to tell me. You have to tell me what happened. Please. Please," he begged, too desperate to be ashamed.

Wes obliged. "We burst into the shack, remember?"

"The boy," said Brody irritably. "Tell me about the boy."

"We could barely see him. He raised his hand. He was pointing something. And you…"

"What?"

"You protected yourself. You took him out."

Brody could barely hear Wes' voice. He was there, again, smelling the desert air, climbing over the mountain of debris in his heavy boots. "And then what?"

"You saw it was a kid."

Brody saw the boy again: lying dead, as usual. The only weapon was the one in Brody's own hand. He heard himself screaming, and felt Wes pulling him into a bear hug.

"I took you outside," Wes continued. "I'd never seen you like that."

A wave of shame threatened to block out Wes' voice. Wes was across the room, telling Brody the story Brody had willed himself to forget. Wes was also beside Brody, hand tight on Brody's neck, murmuring over and over the Brody had to take a breath of the desert air. "How did you make it okay?" asked Brody, forcing himself to be as calm as possible this time around. "What did you do?"

"You sure?" Wes came close again and sat beside Brody.

"I need to know." His own voice echoed inside his head, but Wes didn't need to know that.

"I left you with Sanchez. I told him to stay with you and not to say anything. I went inside. Abbott was kneeling next to the kid. He said there was no weapon, but I knew there'd been one. We all saw it. I looked around, and I saw it a couple of feet away. It wasn't a weapon. It was-"

"A flashlight," Brody completed, not knowing how his lips knew to form the word.

"I'm sorry, Brody. It was dark. You couldn't see. There was no way you could have known."

"But I thought…" The memory of the boy lying dead with the gun in his hand came next. He knew that. Wes had marched him back into the shack and made him look.

"You were already so messed up. I figured if you found out… I didn't know what you'd do."

"What did you do?"

"I made a decision. I took one of the insurgents' guns. I put it in the boy's hand. I told Abbott we had to do this, to save you. You were on the ground, you just kept saying that you killed the kid. So I pulled you into the shack. I said the kid wanted to kill all of us. I told you that you saved us. I thought that telling you that. I thought that it was the best thing for you. I guess I was wrong. I don't expect you to forgive me. But you're a good soldier. That's why I did what I did. That kid dying, it could have happened to anyone. It doesn't mean you're not a good man. I'm sorry if what I did made you forget that. But you're still a good man, Brody. You're still a good soldier."

When Brody was silent for a long time, Wes stood up to go.

"Wes?" Brody asked.

"Yeah?"

"Can you get out of here without anyone seeing you?"

"Why?" asked Wes. Obviously, it went without saying that he _could_, if he chose to.

"I want to be alone and they won't come after me if they think I'm with you."

"What're you gonna do while you're alone?"

"Nothing."

Wes took that as an acceptable answer. "Okay."

* * *

"You and I are going to have a double session today," Dr. Levin told Jessica far too brightly.

"What about Brody? Brody always comes in after me," said Jessica. She and Brody had gotten to be good friends, after all. He had no business betraying her by giving up his scheduled session.

"I know that you and Brody have chosen to confide things to each other, but it is not my place to take part in that."

Jessica rolled her eyes. It was true, but it still worried her. "Is Brody okay?" she asked. "Did he- did he have a flashback? Is he hurt? Did you have to put him in a straight jacket or a padded room or, of my God, you didn't send him back to jail, did you?"

"Brody's patient status has not changed," Dr. Levin conceded.

Jessica sighed. All of a sudden, the double session didn't sound so bad. The world was full of far worse things.

"Are you ready to talk about the elephant in the room?"

Jessica spared a moment to wonder whether Natalie would be a good name for an elephant. Maybe, somewhere in Africa, someone had bottle-raised a baby elephant whose mother had been killed by poachers and called her Natalie.

"Where did you go?" Dr. Levin pushed.

"Africa," said Jessica.

"That sounds nice."

"It was okay.

"If it was just okay, then maybe we can come back to Llanview."

Jessica shrugged.

"You've made magnificent progress, Jessica. You've been able to access all of your memories. I haven't seen a sign of Tess since you've been here, and it hasn't been for lack of effort to bring her out. The pain of losing Nash and Chloe isn't something you'll ever get over, but it's something you're making every effort to handle. But I don't think we can complete the circle until we acknowledge the existence of Natalie."

"Oh, she exists," said Jessica. "Everyone who meets Natalie knows that she exists."

"How does that make you feel?"

Jessica laughed. "You sound like such a therapist."

"How would you prefer that I sounded?"

Jessica considered that. "Like a reporter." Jessica had wanted to make journalism her career back when she hadn't known that controlling her mental illness would become a fulltime job.

Dr. Levin looked amused. "All right. Mrs. Brennan, Edward Levin for the _Saint Ann's Post._ May I ask you a few questions about your sister Natalie?"

A feeling of confidence washed over Jessica. She had been raised to be an heiress; she had been taught from babyhood how to conduct herself in front of cameras and microphones. Even better, she had grown up around journalists. She knew how to suss out what they were looking for and take control of the narrative- or not. "Go ahead, Edward," she said regally. "But I only have time for a few questions today. Five at most."

"Tell me about the first time you saw Natalie."

Jessica nodded, easing into her response. It was an easy question, one she could answer with facts instead of feelings. "I was at school. At L.U. My wallet was missing and I was freaking out. I was really starting to panic. Then in walks this girl, Natalie, and she has it in her hand. She asks me if it isn't mine. Five minutes later, I get a flat tire, and who should appear but Natalie, offering to fix it for me. I thought she was my hero, my guardian angel." She grimaced at the memory. "Of course, later it turned out that it was all a setup. I thought we were friends. I gave her everything I could get her to take. I moved her into our house. I got her a job with Mom. I gave her my clothes, I gave her- well, she was always very careful not to take my money. She didn't even like me to buy her coffee. She did one thing after another to insinuate herself into my life so she could blow it up from the inside."

Jessica stopped herself abruptly when she realized that she had drifted far away from her _facts not feelings_ goal.

Dr. Levin didn't seem to notice. Instead, he casually moved on to his next question. "Tell me about the last time you saw Natalie."

Jessica started to make a face, then reminded herself that this was an interview. "When I checked in here. She said she'd be with me every step of the way if I'd let her." The irony wasn't lost on Jessica. At the beginning, there had been fake offers of friendship Jessica had been eager to accept. Now, there were real offers of love that Jessica didn't know what to do with.

Dr. Levin moved on. "If you could only have one memory of Natalie, which memory would you choose?"

"That's a hard question," said Jessica to buy herself time. She didn't want to choose a moment that had sprung from tragedy or fear, even though hard times often brought out the best in Natalie. She didn't want to choose a moment that had been full of their brothers and their parents and their boyfriends; she wanted a moment that was just theirs. One thought sprang to mind over and over, and even though she knew that there had to be something better, it was the one she used. "I had just found out that I was pregnant with Chloe. I was waiting for just the right time to tell Nash, but Natalie was there and I felt so close to her. She really wasn't a fan of Nash when she met him but she'd worked so hard to find a way to love him like a brother because that's how much she cared about me. She loves Bree. She would have loved the baby. So I told her and she was so happy for me. She promised to keep my secret. It was the way things always should have been. Twins. Secrets. Love. All the good stuff."

_Followed immediately by all of the bad stuff,_ Jessica didn't bother to say. Natalie's schemes had killed Nash, and then Jessica's own weakness had killed Chloe.

"Same question, other way around," Dr. Levin intoned. "If there was one memory of Natalie you could get rid of, what memory would it be?"

"The day I woke up and I saw her in the secret room," said Jessica without hesitation. "When I realized what I'd done to her. When I realized that she was always going to be the strong, generous one and I was always going to be the weak victim. When I realized that as angry as I am about Nash, I wasn't ever going to have the moral high ground again, that she was going to be just as angry as I am. When I realized that just like she had to find a way to love Nash, I was going to have to find a way to love Jared because he's it for her even though it's not fair that she has Jared and I don't have Nash."

"If you had sixty seconds to talk to Natalie and you knew you would never see her again, what would you say?"

Again, Jessica didn't hesitate. She didn't have to. "I would tell her I love her."

"You have about 58 seconds left," Dr. Levin pointed out. "Are you giving her radio silence for all that time?"

"I would thank her for loving Bree and for trying to save Chloe and me when the bomb I'd set to kill her was two feet away and hadn't even exploded yet. I would thank her for loving all the other people we love. I would tell her that I'm sorry for hurting her and that she should never let that make her think that she's less than what she is."

"You still have at least 30 seconds."

"Why are we saying goodbye?" Jessica wanted to know. "Is she dying or am I?"

"Nobody's dying. You've just realized that your paths aren't going to cross anymore. It happens sometimes in families."

"Then I'd tell her that we live in the twenty-first century and we have phones and email and airplanes and that saying goodbye forever is ridiculous. And pointless. We're twins. Something would always pull us back together even if getting there turned out to be really hard."

"That's my five questions. Thank you for your time, Mrs. Brennan."

Jessica's body jerked involuntarily. She had forgotten that she had been playing at being interviewed. She had forgotten that she was in therapy and that even with Brody's time as well as her own, there were time limits.

She ate her lunch, half-glad that Brody was nowhere to be found. She was too tired to talk to him or anyone else. She retreated to her room and fell asleep.

* * *

Brody spent the rest of the day alone in his room. He tried to make the Iraqi boy appear; he called to him in English and in Arabic, but nothing happened. Just the day before, Brody had dreaded the boy's visits. Now, he felt bereft.

He tried to beg off dinner, but the nuns insisted that the choice was not his to make. He ate as quickly as he could, half-glad that Jessica wasn't there to ask him what was wrong. He wasn't up to talking about it.

As soon as he was allowed to return to his room, though, the walls started to close in on him. The space was too small; the air was too stale; his thoughts were too repetitive. "I've gotta get out of here," he said aloud. Decision made, he smirked to himself. Wes had obviously left the premises undetected that morning, or Brody would have been collected for lunch instead of just for dinner.

Anything Wes could do, Brody could do better.

(Except, apparently, keep his shit together when a little boy died in a dilapidated shack beside the smoking ruins of a convoy.)

The fresh air beckoned.

As he evaded what passed for Saint Ann's first line of security, it occurred to Brody that it would be the gentlemanly thing to do to see if Jessica wanted to join him. She must have had a rough day, too, if she had been allowed to weasel out of dinner.

Besides, he missed her. It had been a long time since he'd spent a day without her.

He slid into the women's dormitory and over to her door. A knock would have been too easy for one of her neighbors to detect, so he called her name softly and opened the door unbidden.

She was lying half asleep on her bed. Her eyes widened when she saw him and she sat bolt upright. Brody held a finger to his lips and she nodded.

"What are you doing here?" she whispered so softly that there was no danger of their being detected.

"Going for a walk. Wanted to see if you wanted to join me."

"What, a tour of the common room before the movie? I'll pass."

Brody pointed in the general direction of the grounds. "A real walk. Outside."

"They aren't going to let us do that," Jessica scoffed.

"I can track insurgents through the mountains of Afghanistan without the scouts finding me. I think I can evade a few nuns."

A grin split Jessica's face; Brody's heart jumped unexpectedly in response. "Let's go."

In no time at all (truthfully, Brody was a bit concerned by just how bad the hospital's security was) they were crunching through an early January dusting of snow. The full moon made everything glitter with light and hope and renewal. Jessica, as beautiful as she was, fit right in.

They walked in silence for most of an hour. Then their fingers brushed together and Brody wished that they were anywhere else so that he could have taken her hand in his.

"You okay?" Jessica asked at last, her own reverie shattered by the touch of his hand. "I know you didn't have your normal session with Dr. Levin this morning."

Brody hadn't thought he wanted to talk to anyone. But Jessica wasn't just anyone. "He wanted me to talk to my buddy Wes instead," said Brody. His voice was raspy with emotion, and Jessica took his hand after all. He wished that that small milestone hadn't happened this way.

"What did Wes say?"

"He said the kid I shot didn't have a gun."

Jessica gasped. "But that can't be. Aren't there reports-"

"There are reports that Wes faked because he thought he had to protect me. When I saw that I'd shot an unarmed kid, I freaked out hard. I could have hurt myself or one of my buddies. Wes planted a gun on the kid and told me everything was okay. It makes… it makes a lot of sense, really."

"But?" Jessica prompted.

"The boy. I don't see him. All of a sudden I want to see him, I want to tell him I'm sorry, but he's not here."

"Because he wanted you to know the truth. Now you know, so he's leaving you to move forward."

It was a simple conclusion, but one Brody hadn't thought of. He squeezed Jessica's hand. "Thanks."

She squeezed back, but she shivered, too. "You need to get back inside," he told her. "You're cold."

"Worth it, though," she said, before he held a finger to her lips and led her through a dining room window and then up to the men's dormitory. An alarm wailed threateningly, so Brody pulled Jessica into his own room rather than leading her over to the women's side.

"Shouldn't take long," he told her as she sat on the bed.

She smiled. "No rush."

"I wish you could stay here tonight," he told her, and then kicked himself mentally for having said it aloud. "I mean, I'm not hitting on you. I just-"

"I don't really want to be alone either," she said. "As long as you get me back before bed check in the morning, we should be okay."

Brody demanded that Jessica get under the covers where it was warmer. Jessica demanded that Brody lie down next to her, on top of the covers if he felt form demanded it, rather than spending the night in a chair across the room.

He scanned the darkness once more for the Iraqi boy, but he saw only Jessica's pale hair in the moonlight. When he slept, he dreamed only of that impossible color.

_**TBC**_


End file.
